Re: making debian/copyright machine-interpretable

[Sam Hocevar <sam@zoy.org>]

On Sat, Aug 04, 2007, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:

> A comment about file patterns. For possible future needs I would go for
> specifying clearly the semantic of file patterns, for example whether if
> the first matching pattern apply to a file (as it seems in your example
> on the wikipage) or whether if the last does (as I would recommend,
> since usually, for the sake of human communication, you first want to
> specify the most "common" license of a source package, then the
> exceptions).

   I don't feel strongly about either, but what I don't like in your
recommendation is that information you read from it can be superseded
by the following lines, forcing it to read it all (or from the end) in
order to be sure of what it says.

   I guess it all comes to whether you look at the file asking "what are
the licenses in the package?" in which case you may prefer to see most
common licenses first, or "what license is file XXX?" in which case you
read the file until one of the patterns matches, and you know that's
your licensing terms.

> Similarly, it might be useful to have Vim-like '**'-patterns to match
> arbitrarily deep subdirectories, thought not really required.

   Right. Maybe I could formalise that into saying "pattern <string> is
what `find -wholename */<string>' will match".

Regards,
-- 
Sam.