Hi Chris! * Chris Knadle <Chris.Knadle@coredump.us>, 2014-12-01, 21:12:
Lintian currently refers to "dep5" copyright issues and tags, but the "DEP-5" references have been deprecated in favor of "copyright 1.0":https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/so these tags could be renamed as "copyright 1.0" (or "1.x"), which I think would make them more clear.
Renaming Lintian tags is not something that should be done lightly. Some people might have overridden the tags; others might have put them in their private Lintian profiles.
For similar reasons, it's a bad idea to put version number of the specification in the tag name.
And "copyright 1.0" doesn't seem more clear to me at all. If anything, we should do s/dep5-copyright/machine-readable-copyright/.
-- Jakub Wilk