On Sat, 28 Dec 2019, Scott Kitterman wrote:
The same information could be included in the machine readable format as comments. It's not the format per se that helps, it's how the maintainer organizes the information.
Yes, sure, but Sean mentioned the copyright file of dgit as a good example for a freeform copyright file and I objected.
From my experience Comments: are rather seldom used in File:-blocks and
are much shorter.
Also, personally, I find understanding what debian/copyright says is a trivial effort compared to understanding what copyright/licenses actually apply to the package.
This is true for large packages, but nowadays most packages are simple go-, rust-, ruby-, node-, or whatever-fancy-language-packages where you just need that trivial effort and I would prefer to have this done as fast as possible.
Thorsten