Re: Seeking new members for the DFSG team (Re: Bits from the DPL)
On 2025-11-16 Adrian Bunk <bunk@debian.org> wrote:
[...]
> 3. Policy changes
> The biggest problem is that many policies in the ftpmaster team seem
> to exist because that's how they were done 20 years ago, with huge
> reluctance against changing anything.
> As an example, a huge pain point is debian/copyright handling.
> While for the technical side we went from the pre-debhelper times of
> writing debian/rules by hand to a 3 line dh sequence, debian/copyright
> is still created manually and ftpmaster is forcing people to manually
> implement whatever archaic rules someone invented 25 years ago.
> And it comes across as completely arbitrary and hostile when some
> packages like src:linux get accepted in NEW with a debian/copyright
> that would give a reject for most other packages.
> A better workflow would be something like:
> - a dh_copyright creates and updates debian/copyright
> - the build aborts on non-trivial changes[1]
> - the maintainer reviews the changes when the build aborted
> (including after the initial packaging)
> - a more thorough review happens after the initial upload in NEW
[...]
Hello Adrian,
So essentially the build would run licenserecon and abort on errors?
Wouldn't such an error be a bug in (to be written) dh_copyright and
therefore be better handled by dh_copyright having an extensive testsuite
doublechecking its output against licenserecon?
I am personally not too fond of DEP-5 and I think it is impossible (or
at least horribly time-consuming) to keep a DEP5 copyright current for
projects with active development and without copyright assignment.
Therefore I use cme which does not make this process go away (one will
need to doublecheck whether manual overrides are still needed)) but
makes it manageable.
cu Andreas
--
`What a good friend you are to him, Dr. Maturin. His other friends are
so grateful to you.'
`I sew his ears on from time to time, sure'
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