Re: DEP-5: Please clarify the meaning of "same licence and share copyright holders"

["Giacomo A. Catenazzi" <cate@debian.org>]

Josselin Mouette wrote:
> Le mercredi 10 juin 2009 à 23:56 +0100, Noah Slater a écrit :
> > On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 10:44:33PM +0000, Sune Vuorela wrote:
> > > The more I read about this [DEP5], the more I get the feeling that it is
> > > only pushed by people who never maintained large source packages (that
> > > can change rapidly)
> > Why? We have been over this before.
>
> And I don’t recall anyone explaining in which way it could actually be
> useful.  “It can be parsed automatically” is not a sufficient
> justification for such a large amount of work.  What is the use case?
> What would this data be used for?
>
> > We are developing DEP 5 to codify best practice in a format that is machine
> > parseable. If best practice means that we don't list copyright statements in a
> > legally meaningful way, then so be it. I was asking questions so that I could
> > understand this particular use case.
>
> Unless you are volunteering to write and maintain these files for our
> large source packages, for which maintainers have already explained they
> don’t want to waste their time with such bikeshedding, this discussion
> is 100% useless. 

I agree.
I think we need:
- one tool that generate the new copyright files. People forget to check
  and update files; and the non-tiny packages need such tools (if we need
  the DEP5 format). (the tools as an helper, ev. overwritten by maintainer
  decisions)
- one or more tools that decode the new format. I agree that it is useless
  to have "it can be parsed automatically" if nobody "parse it automatically".
- and a reason

Having the first tool helps in defining the format (we see the real problem
in real cases), and to change/improve the format when we saw really problems.

So before continuing DEP5, could we have a DEP5 the two tools?

ciao
	cate