Re: DEP5 and spdx shortname of license

[Aurélien COUDERC <coucouf@coucouf.fr>]

Hi Fabio,

Le samedi 7 septembre 2024, 21:43:35 CEST Fabio Fantoni a écrit :

> So I wonder, is it possible to put in d/copyright DEP5 the short license 
> names using the spdx ones?

we’ve been doing that for KDE packages since upstream started tagging all source files with SPDX-License / SPDX-Copyright headers and so using SPDX license identifiers some years ago. See [1] for example.

While not strictly adhering to DEP-5 I consider it useful to have a machine-readable-with-SPDX-identifiers and I’m not sure how useful it is to try and translate upstream-provided SPDX identifiers into something else.

Our spec [2] already defines an equivalence rule between License-X and License-X.0 declarations for SPDX compatibility.
For what I’ve seen on the quite vast and diverse KDE source corpus we’d only need 2 additional equivalence rules to be added to matches what that upstream ships :
- equivalence between the + and -or-later suffixes (GPL-2+ / GPL-2.0-or-later)
- equivalence between MIT and Expat.


[1] https://salsa.debian.org/qt-kde-team/kde/plasma-workspace/-/blob/debian/experimental/debian/copyright
[2] https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/#license-short-name


Happy hacking,
--
Aurélien