Title: Debian specific homepage field
DEP: 13
State: DRAFT
Date: 2013-01-15
Drivers: Guido Günther <agx@sigxcpu.org>
URL: http://dep.debian.net/deps/dep13
Source: https://salsa.debian.org/dep-team/deps/-/blob/master/web/deps/dep13.mdwn
License: http://www.jclark.com/xml/copying.txt
Abstract:
    Control file field to link to Debian specific package information

Motivation

Many Debian Maintainers keep additional information about a package like debugging instructions, detailed configuration instructions or answers to frequently occurring questions outside the source package. A common place for this is the Debian wiki. Examples are the OpenStack or Icedove packages.

While one can add a reference to README.Debian this is often overlooked and not easily machine parseable. The aim of this proposal is to add a location where this reference can be kept and where it is easily parseable by package managers or sites like packages.qa.debian.org.

Proposed Format

The proposal is to add a Debian-Homepage field to the source package's control file similar to the already present Homepage (field which is intended for upstream use):

The URL of the Debian specific web site for this package. Preferably
this page would contain information not suitable for README.Debian
like extensive debugging help or very detailed configuration examples
and instructions. The content of this field is a simple URL without 
any surrounding characters such as `<>'.

Possible Enhancements

Like the Homepage field it might make sense to propagate this information to the binary package control file DEBIAN/control and the Debian source control file .dsc to ease processing for package managers.