Re: Let’s turn DEP5 into something useful
On Sat, 13 Jun 2009, Mike Hommey wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 13, 2009 at 10:06:31AM +0100, Neil Williams wrote:
> > Requiring any details of precisely which files are affected makes the
> > whole thing impossible because that requires some form of mass-update
> > (or at least mass check of individual files) at every upstream release.
> > Let's just drop the whole idea for Files: - if some packages find it
> > useful, then the Files: field can be optional but it cannot be sensible
> > to mandate it for large upstream teams.
>
> Plus, the per-file copyright information doesn't reflect anything
> for binary packages, since they refer to source files. And per
> source file licensing information is available in the source
> tarball, where the copyright file has no use.
The main reason to include per-file copyright information in the
copyright file is to make sure that you've actually examined the
copyright of all of the files and to allow for automatically
generated[1] machine-readable copyright files to be updated sanely.
The per-file copyright information should not be mandated, but the
standard should allow for it to be present for the above reasons.
Don Armstrong
1: We probably won't ever reach 100% automation, but the more it's
possible to generate and update the copyright file automatically, the
easier it is for maintainers to generate and maintain them. Ideally
the machine-readable files will be so easy to generate that people
will transition simply because it wastes less time.
--
I'd sign up in a hot second for any cellular company whose motto was:
"We're less horrible than a root canal with a cold chisel."
-- Cory Doctorow
http://www.donarmstrong.com http://rzlab.ucr.edu
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