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Re: DEP5: proposed versioned url for Format: does not work



Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
[...]
> I would recommend in the meantime to use a versioned URL of your 
> choosing.  As I believe is documented - the specific URL should be only 
> an example.

FWIW, I have recently tried to put together a DEP5 compliant copyright
file for a package I'm working on. I say 'tried' because eventually I
had to give up. I was simply unable to get enough information out of the
spec to produce a working file.

What finally made me throw in the towel was precisely the issue that the
OP had --- I couldn't figure out what the versioned URL was supposed to
be. The single example given is incomplete and wrong. In fact, *all* the
examples in the spec are incomplete, containing placeholders instead of
actual information. I spent some time thinking that the versioned URL
was supposed to be <VERSIONED_FORMAT_URL> because that's how it was
shown in the examples!

Given that (a) this is all supposed to be machine readable and therefore
there is very little margin for error, and (b) most packages have really
simple licensing regimes, it would very, very helpful if there could be
a definitive list of known-correct DEP5 copyright files for the most
popular OSI licenses. That way I could say: my package is GPL2;
therefore I pick GPL2.dep from the list; I change the names; it's done.
This would vastly increase the accessibility, and therefore the
popularity, of the DEP5 format.

I even spent a while looking for existing packages with the same license
as mine from which I could steal the copyright file, but I couldn't find
anything which used DEP5...

-- 
┌─── dg@cowlark.com ───── http://www.cowlark.com ─────
│ "I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my
│ telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out
│ how to use my telephone." --- Bjarne Stroustrup

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