On Mon, Aug 15, 2016 at 05:59:43PM +0100, Simon McVittie wrote: > * If we had a good toolchain to compile and audit this stuff, people > and companies who want to know the copyright holders could just use > that to inspect the upstream source code and cut out the middle-man. I've comment on this in my follow-up to Nikolaus. > * Our copyright files are only correct inasmuch as upstream's copyright > attribution is correct. Right. But that doesn't make it less valuable. In provenance theory knowing that someone has witnessed that someone else has said something is a useful data point. And [FOSS] software provenance is a big deal these days. If the price to pay for doing so is not too high, there is an important role for Debian to be played there. > * I will continue to complain as long as my "source" packages are > expected to contain 87kB monsters like > <https://sources.debian.net/src/adwaita-icon-theme/3.20-3/debian/copyright/>, > which is fairly clearly not anyone's preferred form for modification, > and if we're being honest probably not really anyone's preferred form for > consumption either. I beg to disagree (at least) with the latter. No matter the size, once parsed you can query that file with questions like "what's the license/copyright of this file according to [this] Debian [package]?". That's one of the thing that the Debsources API is meant to allow. But to be clear: I'm not advocating for keeping nor ditching anything in particular here. I've been asked which level of integration of machine-readable debian/copyright exists in Debsources. I've answered to that, testifying that we do have downstreams of our *current* debian/copyright files. No matter that, Debian can decide: that is not worth maintaining that information / that is worth only if better tooling is available / that is worth only if someone else shows up to do the job / etc. Like it or not, downstreams will cope. Cheers. -- Stefano Zacchiroli . zack@upsilon.cc . upsilon.cc/zack . . o . . . o . o Computer Science Professor . CTO Software Heritage . . . . . o . . . o o Former Debian Project Leader . OSI Board Director . . . o o o . . . o . « the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club »
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