DEP-5 is a good step forward to standardize copyright information. While it's indeed useful to determine a license type, there's no guarantee stand-alone license paragraphs or license headers are accurate (i.e. typos, GPL-2 license header while declaring GPL-2+), or canonically formatted (i.e. 72-char lines vs. 80-char lines, different spacing or indentation).
Plus, some license text are not expressed in RFC822 syntax, and maintainers must adapt it to fit into DEP-5. As a reference, take MPL license, which is very long and fullfilled with spacing, converting it by hand is definitely time-consuming and error prone. I'd like to ask the following questions: * Is there a tool which, given a license text in raw format, converts it to match RFC822 syntax? * In case it exists, is it able to perform sanity checks on the licenses (i.e. license text matches intended one)? * In case it doesn't exist yet, would it be worth implementing it? * Which language would you use to implement it? I guess the answer to the last question would be Perl, as several related tools use Perl already (think of lintian, or libconfig-model-perl), but I suspect other scripting languages could fit as well. Cheers, Luca -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/cadk7b0mdnkkq1qnib6ybc7l+ae51wkwvyu-h0rjtq5nsemg...@mail.gmail.com
