* Others have mentioned the ordering problem that puts the main license
last. Seems that Packaging-Copyright at the top is another case of
this problem (see you've now removed that special case name, but the
debian/* data would still go there). "Most specific matching glob wins"[1]
might be a better approach. Then the licenses could be ordered with the
main one first, or in whatever order that makes sense to humans, and
if someone wanted to write a tool to extract a given file's license,
that could be done too.
* Having to munge the license text to fit it in the 822 format is one of
the uglier bits of this proposal, especially since we don't require
that license texts be DFSG free..
* It's a shame that the boilerplate about where to find the full text of
the GPL is still needed at the end of the file. One way to avoid this
might be to use:
License: /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-2
The info about which versions apply would need to be expressed some
other way though.
* I don't see much benefit in putting freeform text at the top of the
file. Keeping it all at the bottom would simplify parsing/validating.
* Makes even more clear that debian/copyright is not the best place for
Source URLs. They rather stick out from the other data, and this would
be a great time to go ahead and move them to the control file.
Dropping them entirely in favour of watch files -- not so good: It's
good to know where a package came from even if a tarball can't be
auto-extracted from there by uscan.
--
see shy jo
[1] Which is perhaps interesting to implement. Google tells me that
smake has this concept.
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