On Mon, 24 Dec 2007 17:36:06 +0100 David Paleino <d.paleino@gmail.com> wrote: > > A machine-interpretable format for debian/copyright is already > > available. Why clutter the dpkg and apt-cache with licence lines? > > debian/copyright is not available via the APT cache, thus cannot be available > to wrappers like python-apt and others. So? Why is knowing the licence important before installation anyway? It's in main, it's free software. It's not in main, a one-line addition in the dpkg output is not going to tell you much about why. >From a user perspective, there is no difference between any package in main as far as a licence is concerned. > > Some packages can have multiple (compatible) licences - the details of > > what is licenced under which can only be properly determined by reading > > debian/copyright. It's installed for every package so I don't see the > > point. > > Again, it's not about _installed_ packages, but about fetching this information > from the APT cache (i.e. can't install packages on Alioth just to read > debian/copyright...), or any other place that won't require root privileges > (debian/copyright is online, but I believe that parsing it might be kind of a > nightmare, if one wants to give a "standardized" output). I can't see any point in having such output available to the user. If you want this data, write a dedicated wrapper - don't burden everyone else with an extra 20,000 lines in Packages.gz - create a local mirror if necessary. > [1] http://debian-med.alioth.debian.org/tasks/bio.php So for the sake of one webpage, every Debian user gets yet more bloat in Packages.gz. Oh good. Sorry, I think that's a really really really bad idea. Almost makes me think it's 1st April. -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.data-freedom.org/ http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/ http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
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