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Re: Sponsorship requirements and copyright files



On Sun, Mar 22, 2009 at 11:54:49AM +0000, Neil Williams wrote:
> Then reconsider the remark. The proposed format is more work for many
> overworked maintainers, it presents no clear gain for those maintainers,
> it overly complicates the file and file handling. There is no point
> arguing about these facts, overworked maintainers have made their
> feelings clear and no amount of bleating from those supporting the
> proposal will now change their minds. Only a complete restart will be
> acceptable.

Remember that the format can be used however we decide is best for Debian, even
if that includes the recent discussion on omitting full copyright holder
details. As a machine readable format, that allows us to potentially integrate
this into lintian, and any number of dpkg tools that might want to perform
license compatibility checks. You seem to be arguing that most people dislike
the format, perhaps as a concept and not in its current grotesque incarnation,
which I would contend given it's large, and voluntary, uptake.

> I, for one, would rather see the entire proposal backported to revision
> 50 or thereabouts and left at that. I refuse to use later revisions as
> a basis for my own packages and I will not sponsor packages that, in my
> own view, overly complicate debian/copyright by using this proposal as
> a template for their own packages. The proposal, as it stands, is
> insane and anyone recommending it needs to review the reasons for
> recommending such a grandiose waste of my time.

Yes, the proposal is pretty absurd at the moment. I believe this has been
mentioned already in this thread. At some point, the benefits of the wiki
process were overshadowed by the problems it created coordinating the effort. As
a result, many of the core drivers (myself included) backed away from doing any
repair work, and have been waiting until after Lenny to restart the effort using
a proper method and mailing list for communication.

I too use an old version for my packages, because I dislike the current one.

> No, the current proposal is overtly complex, unnecessarily verbose,
> requires enormous amounts of extra time from maintainers, the proposal
> itself still has no clear structure and is completely unusable. The
> machine readable format is not human readable and bears no comparison
> with the clarity of debian/control.

I think this is going over the top, a little. But for the most part I agree.

Like we've previous stated, we do not want the current proposal evaluated. We
have plans to restart the effort, collaborating via reasoned discussion on some
mailing list, and then present a polished version for wider discussion.

The aim of this proposal, at least from my perspective, was achieving machine
readability in a similar vein to debian/control in the least possible intrusive
way. The current proposal falls short of this by a large margin. As you seem to
have considered this in some depth, it would be great to get your collaboration
when we take a hatchet to it for "version 2" as you put it.

> The proposal has been drowned in pointless edits and is unworthy of
> further consideration, IMHO. Either backport to a point where the idea
> is once again deemed sane by those maintainers who would most benefit
> from tools to support updates of debian/copyright or abandon the entire
> proposal as a good idea gone bad.
>
> Maybe someone else can look at it after Squeeze and raise version 2.0
> from the ashes.

It seems we are in violent agreement.

Best,

-- 
Noah Slater, http://tumbolia.org/nslater


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