On Thu, Sep 17, 2009 at 10:55:45AM +0900, Charles Plessy wrote:
> Given that identifiers like ‘Other1’, ’Other2’… are ugly or even confusing, and
> that the machine-readable format has the goal to be very human-readable as
> well, I propose to remove the default to ’other’ from the DEP and leave the
> responsability of dealing with empty first lines to the parsers. Of course, for
> licenses that have no short name proposed by the DEP, the person writing the
> copyright file is free to pick whatever makes sense instead of leaving the
> field empty. You nicely summarised this in the patch you sent previously.
FWIW, that sounds reasonable to me. In fact, that's already the practice
I'm using when encountering weird licenses that needs to be factorized
out in debian/copyright.
> Nevertheless, this leaves us in a situation where the machine-readable format
> can not indicate that a license is derived from a very frequent template such
> as the BSD license. For that case, I think that we could add a ’Similar to’
> qualifier, like in the following example:
Looks unneededly difficult to parse to me, considering that in that
field you already have to parse "boolean license formulae" and the
various postfix decorators (e.g., "+"). Continuing that stile, having a
postfix "-like" sounds more reasonable to me, e.g.: "BSD-like | foo |
bar". That way you will preserve the good parsing property that all
atomic tokens denote a single license.
If you go that way, the DEP text should then be changed to clarify that
all license keywords decorated by a postfix "-like" will need a
mandatory "License:" block (probably you can reuse the mention that was
there for "other").
Cheers.
--
Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -<>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
Dietro un grande uomo c'è ..| . |. Et ne m'en veux pas si je te tutoie
sempre uno zaino ...........| ..: |.... Je dis tu à tous ceux que j'aime
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