On Mon, 2026-09-14 at 08:30 +0200, Yves-Alexis Perez wrote: > On Mon, 2026-09-14 at 08:00 +0200, Mechtilde Stehmann wrote: > > > Hi Mechtilde, thanks for the review. > > > > > > I'll try to fix the obvious issues, but I am not spending endless > > > hours > > > doing > > > things which should be automated in Debian. > > > > What do you want to automate in Debian. Do you have a special task > > in mind? > > I would have the whole debian/copyright management automated.
Well, that seems a wonderful goal, and I'm sure it's been thought of before, but the reality is that there is very little consistency among upstream packages that allows for it. There are plenty of people in Debian who write tools to assist with Debian packaging, but in our short history the DFSG team have focused almost exclusively on reviewing, and working on tools to build packages would not only be a distraction, it would be a conflict of interest. > Sure, but d/copyright is mostly copy/pasting stuff from upstream > tarball to the binary package with zero added value. And the > potential rest is mostly done by change because maintainers aren't > exactly lawyers so the result is at best adequate. While it is true that the information collated in debian/copyright is assembled from information that is elsewhere in the upstream package, it is precisely because that information "could be anywhere" that having it collected into a single, known location, in a structured and predictable format has value. If you find that the work of other packagers is "inadequate", then perhaps you should file bugs against those packages, requesting them to do a better job, rather than proposing that the standards should not be enforced? Thanks, Andrew McMillan > > It's a lot of time wasting for pretty low bar result. dep-5 and > scripts like > decopy help but honestly that should be done at the infrastructure > level or > something. > > I don't know about you obviously but I have very little time > available and I'm > *not* enjoying it spending it on that. > > Regards, -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Porirua, New Zealand +64 (27) 288 6741 https://andrew.mcmillan.net.nz momentum, n.: What you give a person when they are going away. ----------------------------------------------------------------------
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