On 06/06/2011 12:39 PM, Ingy dot Net wrote: > This is the thing that really gets me. Does Debian really want human time > spent on every last bit? This may seem noble but it really doesn't scale. it's not every last little bit -- it's the bits where the code meets our legal, social, and moral obligations that we're talking about here. > I'm not saying that you shouldn't strive for perfection, but computers are > better at perfection than humans. Humans are better at programming than > computers. I'd actually argue that computers are better at programming than computers, but then we'd get into an argument about what "programming" means, which gets increasingly off-topic ;) And computers are notoriously bad at sorting out copyright and licensing details, as evidenced by the fact that the coding/compiling/documentation-formatting bits have all managed by computers for years and we're only recently starting to think about machine-*readable* copyright and licensing information. > So why isn't the effort spent in analyzing the code that checks > the code, rather than analyzing every package that goes in, which is flawed > at so many levels. Because ultimately, if there is a legal problem (e.g. an accusation of copyright infringement) or a moral concern about what we're doing (e.g. redistributing unmodifiable code), it is the human that is legally and morally responsible, not the computer. I think your goals of making better integration between debian and CPAN are excellent, and I think the work you're doing has the potential for enormous positive impacts for both projects. I just want to discourage you from thinking that it will produce a silver-bullet tool whereby everything in CPAN gets automatically included into debian by default. That part probably won't happen, simply because of a slight impedance mismatch between the communities and cultures of the two projects. Your work has the potential to reduce that impedance mismatch (which is awesome), but it will not eliminate it entirely. Anyway, i don't want this to discourage you; i'm just trying to clarify some of the obstacles that might be unavoidable. If you manage to help people avoid a bunch of other obstacles, that's still a great thing. Regards, --dkg
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