Bug#487201:
On Sunday, August 28, 2011, Ximin Luo <infinity0@gmx.com> wrote:
> On 28/08/11 02:33, Steve Langasek wrote:
>> On Sun, Aug 28, 2011 at 02:00:33AM +0100, Ximin Luo wrote:
>>> If you were to write a program that could report the copyright status of
>>> every single file on the system, it would be weird if you showed a
>>> slightly different GPL3 for different files. Even if you parsed a license
>>> text to a canonical form, I doubt this would be a visually pleasing form,
>>> or even one that has a coherent logical structure. e.g. Steve suggested
>>> collapsing whitespace - but this loses (e.g.) paragraph information.
>>
>> How you decide to format the license text for display is an *entirely*
>> separate question from checking whether the license text is correct. I
>> never suggested using the case- and whitespace-smashed form for display (or
>> even storing it as a file).
>>
>
> In any case, the current situation makes this (formatting) hard to do. It's not
> a good solution programatically, to have a "canonical" form that isn't easily
> formattable.
At this point you're arguing implementation details. You don't have to format it at all, because the package already contains a formatted version of the text. The real issue is that the "known correct" text of the license would have to exist somewhere. Where? In some package that contains commonly used licenses?
People don't seem to agree what common-licenses is for. If it's to save disk space, then Popcon has all the information needed to figure out exactly how many bytes would be saved by putting it in common-licenses and replacing all existing copies with a symlink. If it's to save work, then how much work would be saved compared to the cost of adding it to common-licenses?
--
-PJ
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