Re: suggestion: www.debian.org package list show the URL of the program
On Sat, Jan 30, 1999 at 10:13:38AM -0500, Ben Pfaff wrote:
> Shaleh <shaleh@livenet.net> writes:
>
> how hard would it be to have the Packages pages on the Debian web site show the
> packages home URL, i.e. where the author is? A few times I have been hunting
> for this because I needed a bsd or Sun version of a program. Downloading the
> orig.tar.gz and looking inside can be cumbersome.
>
> Perhaps the website could mirror the copyright file from each
> package. This contains the copyright notice from the source as well
> as the upstream URL.
>
The copyright files are already available. Unfortunately, many packages don't
include the programs homepage.
It would be nice if we could put the programs url on the page explicitly, if one
exists. The problem is that there is no standard place or format for this.
Sure some packages include it in the copyright file, but it is not in a standard
format which makes it difficult to extract (grabbing the first url in the copyright
file is prone to error given the lack of a standard format).
I have been advocating for the creation of a standard place for information such as
this for a long time. The information does not need to go into the archives Packages
file (they are large enough as it is), as long as it can be extracted from a .deb
in a known way. If any of you know of a good way to do this, please bring it up
on debian-policy.
Jay Treacy
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