On 08/12/2010 03:27 PM, Lars Wirzenius wrote: > On to, 2010-08-12 at 14:59 +0200, Bernd Zeimetz wrote: >> On 08/12/2010 02:45 PM, Lars Wirzenius wrote: >> > It would be good to have DEP-5 done quite early in the squeeze+1 >>> development cycle to give as much time as possible for adoption. >> >> A few comments: >> - Personally I find the format unnecessarily complicated and much more >> annoying >> to use than writing a normal debian/copyright file, especially for >> complicated >> cases. > > You're not required to use it. If you want to improve the format, please > make concrete proposals, or at least explain why it is complicated and > annoying. (If you've already done so, a URL will be sufficient. I do > not, unfortunately, have the time to re-read three years worth of old > discussions about this.)
Its nothing that could be done by improving the format. Especially in large projects you often have a lot of weird situations reagrding the licensing, or GPL with various exceptions (not only to allow linking ssl, there are many more...) and a lot of other weirdness. For me its just faster to describe the situation in human-parsable words and copy+paste the license. For small sources or largish sources with one developer and one license it should not make a difference in the time one needs to spend to write debian/copyright. Don't understand me wrong, I'm all in favor for making debian/copyright machine-readable, I just think that there are more important things to do when you have to decide what to do with your spare time. >> - Migrating all packages to the new format is an insane task which would >> take a >> *long* time and a lot of work. > > There is no goal to migrate all packages. That's a strawman. Good. > >> - Instead of writing such files (and keeping them updated), we should put >> more >> energy into doing this task automatically. > > It is obviously true that it would be good to make all of this reliably > automated. However, even when that is done, it's useful to have things > in one place in a Debian package, i.e. debian/copyright, and it'll still > be useful for that place to be machine parseable. > > More importantly, making debian/copyright be machine parseable provides > some immediate benefits, without having to wait for a solution to the > big, difficult problem. True, but to gain some benefit you'd need a lot of DEP-5'ed packages to have something useful to work on. Are there any statistics about the number of packages which use DEP5 in d/copyright? -- Bernd Zeimetz Debian GNU/Linux Developer http://bzed.de http://www.debian.org GPG Fingerprints: 06C8 C9A2 EAAD E37E 5B2C BE93 067A AD04 C93B FF79 ECA1 E3F2 8E11 2432 D485 DD95 EB36 171A 6FF9 435F -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/4c640523.7060...@bzed.de