Bug#700970: how an affected stanza be identified and how would the right one look like?
Hi,
> Unfortunately, people often don't pay attention to those rules, and just
> paste upstream license text to d/copyright, adding single space in front
> of every line, and adding a dot to empty ones. This results in wrong
> formatting for many licenses, BSD ones being the most popular victims
> in my experience.
>
> It would be nice if Lintian could catch such mistakes.
>
> Please see the attachments for an example of such incorrectly formatted
> license text, and two possible way it can be fixed.
I'm currently looking into the lintian code which checks debian/copyright and
was thinking about this bugreport. How would lintian check whether a block of
text is indented "wrongly"? Would you suggest to use heuristics to determine
the intended layout?
And which solution would lintian accept as the "right" one and stop
complaining?
I'd personally favor the second solution to the formatting you gave because it
would have the list items flow and not verbatim. I recently encountered a
similar issue with the AGPL (sorry) which indents every paragraph with a space
in its plain text version.
One way to solve this would be to let lintian have a registry of all licenses
mentioned in the debian copyright 1.0 spec in a properly formatted way. Though
it would probably be hard to agree on the one way how to write all the licenses
in the Policy §5.6.13 way.
I cannot think of a good heuristic which would "autodetect" for example your
BSD license example. How would you see this bug being solved best?
cheers, josch
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