On 03/ 9/10 09:09 AM, Tim Foster wrote:
On Mon, 2010-03-08 at 15:31 +0000, Ghee Teo wrote:
Padraig has talked to me about including a more meaningful value for
pkg.description in the IPS manifest for the Desktop packages. That is,
something a bit more verbose than pkg.summary.
Would a pkg.description containing a URL be a better way of providing
this level of detail? If the description was a URL, the GUI could
render the page that URL pointed to. If pkg.description didn't contain a
URL, it could word-wrap and inline the text value.
While this is an interesting suggestion, I think it is not a practical
solution for the following reasons:
- the description text while available is in the open but is it is not
readily referable by a URL, they are often capture in source rpm or some
compressed metadata.
- doing this on the fly will be a big performance hit on the GUI
- In system that have not access to the internet, as you said render
this useless.
- These information is pretty static and unlikely to change once they
are in place.
I am thinking of pulling in these data from the open as much as I can
instead of writing hundred of these by hands. So the data is pretty much
depend on what I can pull from the open.
If you're pulling the data externally, it suggests there's already a
source for this information (albeit one out of our control) Using that
source, rather than just duplicating its contents may be better.
I am taking this now from ubuntu metadata,
http://ie.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/lucid/main/binary-i386/
This would open packages up to the transient nature of the internet
though. We could avoid that by implementing a 'description' action,
similar to the existing 'license' action, to allow package authors
publish rich descriptions to the repository.
In the desktop spec files, there is a option field called URL which
contains a reference to the module website, potentially fit your concept
here. Though, a quick grep shows that many spec file does not contain
this entry.
-Ghee
With URLs pointing to internet resources, it would be difficult to
search the text of those descriptions from 'pkg search' and would make
life difficult for those on private networks (though of course, standard
internet search engines would have indexed them already)
cheers,
tim
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