Bug#671009: debian-policy: does not mention debtags
James Hunt <james.hunt@ubuntu.com> writes:
> I recently came across a package (casper) which included a "Tag:" field
> in 'apt-cache show' output. Obtaining the source showed this field in
> the debian/control file, but there is no mention of "Tag:" field in the
> Debian Policy.
> After fruitless Googling, I asked on IRC and was pointed to:
> http://wiki.debian.org/Debtags
> ... which provided the information I was looking for.
> However, since "Tag:" is an optional binary package control file field
> (like Depends, Essential, etc) and since it is used by packages in
> stable Debian releases, surely this should be documented directly in the
> Debian Policy manual? (or at the very least mentioned in passing to
> avoid confusion)?
I think Tag was generated from the external debtags data and only appears
in the Packages list, not in any package, which makes it outside the scope
of Policy. Policy doesn't document the structure of an apt repository,
only what goes into a Debian package itself, and I don't think Tag fields
in the package would be used by anything.
(I certainly wouldn't be adverse to Policy or some similar document
describing apt repositories at some point, since I don't know of any good
documentation of that somewhere else, but it's probably not a high
priority.)
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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