Re: Copyright License Proposal
I think Josef has this just about right and I previously attempted to
make these points to Ingy on #debian-perl.
One consequence of this is that I started on Test::Copyright. The idea
is that it starts by getting the license information from the META data
(as Ingy suggests) but then it goes on from that. It looks for a
LICENSE/COPYING/README file and makes sure that the license information
in that matches what is in the data, and then it looks for the Copyright
information in the remainder of that file. Then it makes sure that every
.pm/.pod file has a copyright and license statement matching what is in
the LICENSE/COPYING/README file. It could easily be expanded to cope
with XS modules and different licenses on different files though I will
satisfy myself with getting the straightforward case to work first. The
latter in particular would require something equivalent to DEP-5 in the
LICENSE/COPYING/README file. It uses Software::License
so some of that standardization effort is being leveraged.
To summarize Jozef's points. What we need is to improve the quality and
consistency of license/copyright information in CPAN. A release test
module that checks for this seems the most consistent with current
practice and so most likely to gain traction.
On 06/06/11 10:20, Jozef Kutej wrote:
> On 2011-06-06 10:04, Ingy dot Net wrote:
>> My goal is to create tools that help CPAN Authors to become the Debian
>> Maintainers of their *OWN* distributions.
>> My goal is *NOT* to create tools for automatically making Debian Packages from
>> other people's CPAN modules.
>
> is there a problem with dh-make-perl? it's nearly perfect now, isn't it? may be
> working towards uploading it to CPAN will close the gap between Debian and CPAN
> authors? Perl developers are too much mused to finding everything on CPAN, so it
> might trick some of them to think, that what is not there doesn't exists...
>
>> From that perspective, it should be every author's right to opt into trusting a
>> tool that helps them expand the audience of their works to Debian.
>
> as an CPAN author that knows about the problems with distro packaging I would
> really like to see something like Gregor pointed out - "Kwalitee::Repackageable"
> or "Kwalitee::Distros" or even "Test::DistroReady". running a kwalitee script or
> a distro-ready test suit before releasing to CPAN might be what's doable and
> reasonable for a CPAN author while helping to remove common packaging problems
> for the distribution. if it will be generic enough to match the packaging
> problems of other distributions too, it might take off. this might be a
> challenge for you Ingy, as you worship the acmeism, so a distribution agnostic
> kwalitee/test tool might be an exact fit, no?
>
> there is and always will be a need for someone else then the author to have a
> look at the distribution changes to updated what is necessary => for example
> copyright-license for new/changed files, special binary/version dependecies, if
> the modules still works well together within the distribution, patch purely
> Debian related issues, filter user bug reports and report upstream only when
> it's relevant or with additional troubleshooting info and making sure the CPAN
> author didn't went crazy...
>
> personally I'm not good at packaging as it requires patience, sense for details
> and pedantic work to be done. fortunately this group has members with these
> skills that do a good job so the Debian-Perl package base is well done and
> steadily growing.
>
> cheers
> Jozef
>
>
--
Nicholas Bamber | http://www.periapt.co.uk/
PGP key 3BFFE73C from pgp.mit.edu
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