Stephan Lachnit <stephanlach...@debian.org> writes: > It would require a minor change: putting the verbatim license texts in a > single file is not possible anymore. But I don't why just copying the > licenses to "/usr/share/doc/PACKAGE/licenses/LICENSE" in addition to the > SPDX formatted debian/copyright would be any worse than the current way.
I recommend thinking about how to generate an existing debian/copyright file and putting the SPDX-formatted one in a different location. You're going to want to decouple the new work from any transition that requires other people change tools. There are a lot of tools that make assumptions about debian/copyright, and trying to track them all down will be counterproductive for trying to make forward progress on exposing information in a more interoperable format. The way I see this, there are three different things that have been discussed on this thread: 1. Consuming upstream data in SPDX or REUSE format and automating the generation of required Debian files using it. 2. Exposing SPDX data for our packages for downstream consumption. 3. Aligning the standard way to present Debian copyright information with other standards. I can tell you from prior experience with DEP-5 that 3 is wildly controversial and will produce the most pushback. There are a lot of packagers who flatly refuse to even use the DEP-5 format, and (pace Jonas's aspirations) I don't expect that to change any time soon. I think that's fine for what you're trying to accomplish, because I think 1 and 2 are where the biggest improvements can be found. As long as your system for managing copyright and license information can spit out a DEP-5 debian/copyright file (in its current or a minorly modified format, not with new files elsewhere that would have to be extracted from the package), you are then backward-compatible with the existing system and that takes 3 largely off the table (which is what you want). Then you can demonstrate the advantages of the new system and people can choose to be convinced by those advantages or not, similar to DEP-5, and we can reach an organic consensus without anyone feeling like they're forced to change how they do things. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>