Hi developers, While I'm packaging morla[1], I've found in the tarball tree a little XML file named "doap.rdf", which turned out to be a DOAP[2][3] file. An apt-file query (on 'sid', i386) showed me that there are at least three packages which install such files:
flumotion: usr/share/doc/flumotion/flumotion.doap.gz mach: usr/share/doc/mach/mach.doap.gz python-gst0.10: usr/share/doc/python-gst0.10/gst-python.doap I haven't be found any quick way to search the Debian source archive for file names, but Google Code Search provided[4] me with a rough estimate of how many DOAP files are around there, in tarballs and VCSs. There are several dozens; what's most noteworthy, some of them belong to non-aforementioned softwares included in Debian. Sadly enough, they appear to have very loose conventions about naming (with respect to contents, at least a validator[5] exists, although currently only for any «pure DOAP, not DOAP in an RDF container»). Now, DOAP is of course an interesting thing from the semantic web. The Apache Software Foundation supports[6] it. An ITP bug[7] has been filed for moap[8], a project maintenance tool using DOAP files. There are DOAP generators[9], maybe some converters, and so on. Info in these files are kind of like those which one may find on e.g. Freshmeat about projects. doapspace.org[10] collects DOAP entries, mostly generated from Sourceforge updates... So, I don't know how these files might be useful (as sources for information on upstream projects, I guess). Anyway, I have some questions I'd like to see answered, so I may do a better job (as a prospective maintainer). 1) Should we include DOAP files from upstream in packages? (always?) 2) If so, where? (usr/share/doc sounds OK if they are only provided for sake of completeness, while IMVHO if we want them to be globally parsed and/or indexed it would be good to have an ad-hoc hierarchy under e.g. usr/share/doap) 3) (related to the above question) Should they have uniform names? If so, in what form? Should we distinguish between pure DOAP and «DOAP in an RDF container»? I know you will enlighten me. :-) Thanks. [1] http://www.morlardf.net [2] http://usefulinc.com/doap/ [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOAP [4] http://www.google.com/codesearch?q=file%3A%28doap.rdf%7Cdoap.xml%7Cdoap%24%29 [5] http://doapspace.org/validate_form [6] http://projects.apache.org/doap.html [7] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=422660 [8] https://thomas.apestaart.org/moap/trac [9] http://crschmidt.net/semweb/doapamatic/ [10] http://doapspace.org Regards, -- Luca