[Catalog-sig] PEP 345 Update

[P.J. Eby]

At 04:09 AM 8/23/2010 +0200, Tarek Ziadé wrote:
>The fields descriptions are quite clear, Obsoletes is useful for reorganizing
>softwares into different releases names, whereas Conflicts marks a release
>to be incompatible with another one,

If that's the case, then it should suffice to explain in the PEP that 
the intent of this field is for an author/owner to describe 
reorganization of their own software, rather than for one package to 
claim that it's a replacement for another.

Without that explanation the intent of the field is not clear -- 
especially for people coming from backgrounds where that field would 
have distribution-official status, i.e. the field *would* be being 
set by a trusted party.


>the PEP is about the metadata, not the softwares that will implement it.

Which is why I've found the previous package metadata PEPs to be 
pretty useless: they described fields in the abstract without much 
concrete semantics.  And thus, they were not worth writing software 
to parse, most of the time.

To put it another way, without suggested semantics, people will put 
whatever they feel like in the fields, because they likewise have no 
idea of how the information will be used, or what the consequences of 
entering that information will be.

In short: if it's not going to be used, why have it?  And if it *is* 
going to be used, why leave the semantics undefined?