Re: DEP5: Machine-readable debian/copyright (the paperwork)

[Carsten Hey <carsten@debian.org>]

Hi,

a few remarks about DEP #5:


"The Expat License" is rather unknown under this name, thus I propose
adding a comment like this to its description:

  Expat     The Expat License (often referred as MIT license, see
            comment in *Problematic Licenses*)


It's might not be obvious for all which BSD licenses are meant by "BSD"
and "FreeBSD", thus I propose appending " (3-clause BSD)" and
respectively " (2-clause BSD)" to their descriptions.


"Format-Specification:" is needlessly long, "Format:" would be
sufficient.

Forking this spec would render all (to be written) tools to parse
changelog entries useless and it would complicate exchanging Debian
source packages between deb based distributions.  Except being able to
fork this spec easily I see no reason to add its URI instead of
a version number to changelog files.

I would prefer "Format: $major.$minor[.$revision]" (for example
Format: 0.0.r135 or Format: 1.0) over "Format-Specification: $uri",
even when the URI will be much shortened in future.


Carsten