On 19 Sep 1997, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I find the Packaging manual to be ambiguous as far as this
> issue is concerned. I am including all that I thought was relevant to
> the issue below. I do not see a prohibition on additional information
> that may help the user choose packages (quite the contrary).
The problem with additional info is that the text is included in the
Packages and available/status files. These files are already very large
(making dpkg and friends very slow on low-end computers) so we should not
put more infos in these files yet. This objection has been raised by a few
developers (if I remember right it was Klee and Brian) with the discussion
of additional control fields.
Note, that we don't have a decision on this yet. We agreed that we should
delay this discussion until Klee presents his new source packaging format.
Until then, any additional info should go into a file in /usr/doc/pkg/ .
> It has been argued that the author name could be important in
> deciding whether to install a package on not -- if I see a package
> xyyzzt -- A wholly re-written text based news management system
> I am likely to ignore it -- until I notice it was written by, Say,
> Larry Wall, or Donald Knuth ;-)
>
> I have to concede that this information is probably better
> some place else -- like in a separate header field. In fact, I think
> there was a motion earlier to expand package headers by two or thre
> lines (Author(s) and URL(s); multiline fields); It seems to have died
> out. Until something like that is implemented in policy, I see no
> harm in people putting the correct attribution in the description
> field.
The discussion did not die--it was just postponed. And as I said, it would
hurt when the files grow even larger now.
Thanks,
Chris
-- Christian Schwarz
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