On Mon, Jan 10, 2011 at 10:56:31AM +0100, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote: > On Mon, Jan 10, 2011 at 01:03:21AM -0600, Steve Langasek wrote: > > Pointing to particular revisions is ugly, but is less ugly IMHO than > > introducing (again) the possibility of multiple incompatible specs > > (subtly or otherwise) all referred to with the same "Format" > > declaration. > That is correct and this thought has bothered me as well. However, how > is it any different than, say, the format of debian/changelog? Unlike > the format of debian/control, not even a Standards-Version field is > associated to it. There is just software that deal with it that will > fail upon some (incompatible) format change. The Standards-Version field is associated with the package as a whole, not with debian/control alone. So yes, Standards-Version is a perfectly adequate declaration of the relevant policy for handling debian/changelog. Furthermore, the debian changelog format is quite stable (no backwards-incompatible changes in well over a decade, notwithstanding the deprecation of the never-used alternative changelog format support), and dpkg-parsechangelog is the authoritative implementation of a parser for debian/changelog. None of these considerations apply to DEP5 parsing today. > Arguably, once DEP5 will be integrated into debian-policy, one might > consider the format of debian/copyright to be subject of > Standards-Version (if and only if the maintainer will have chosen to go > the readable debian/copyright way). There has been no plan to subsume DEP5 into Debian Policy. The only plan I've seen is to turn *maintenance* of the machine-readable copyright format over to the Debian Policy process and to *ship* a copy of the spec in the debian-policy package; we will still need a way to point to unique URLs in the Format: field to distinguish between incompatible revisions, unless and until DEP5 is incorporated into Debian Policy itself at a later date. -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/ slangasek@ubuntu.com vorlon@debian.org
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