Bug#487201:
Package: base-files
Version: 6.5
Followup-For: Bug #487201
Hi, I'm going to re-open this discussion and present this argument from more
perspectives than simply "number of packages".
I've been trying to package a bunch of mozilla extensions and getting used to
all the book-keeping that debian packages need, much of which is copyright.
I read DEP-5 and have been working on getting my debian/copyright files to
conform to that standard. However, one major annoyance is the inclusion of
verbatim licenses, in particular MPL-1.1.
The "correct" way (according to a strict interpretation of debian policy and
DEP-5) to do this is to include MPL-1.1 verbatim within a License: paragraph,
which means you need to indent every single line by one space, and fill in
the blank lines with a "." character. The "hardcore" geeks will say "oh you
can write a sed script to do that easily", but this takes some mental effort,
so not surprisingly people have come up with their ad-hoc solutions to this,
usually involving including MPL.txt or somesuch in the /doc/ folder.
The problem is that everyone does this in slightly different ways, so it
becomes very hard to extract this information mechanically. Additionally, it
creates more work for anyone reviewing the copyright of packages. Sure, one
might see that a package points to MPL.txt, then assume it's the MPL, but
then <strong>why have that file there in the first place, if you're not going
to read all of it</strong>? That seems ridiculous and counter to the point of
having a format that's supposed to make copyright info machine-parseable.
In short, having a shared place for widely-used licenses (such as all the ones
mentioned in [1]), would be extremely useful to the goal of MACHINE-PARSEABLE
COPYRIGHT, simply because it eliminates a crap load of unnecessary redundancy,
that humans and machines then do not have to read or verify. It also makes
package maintainers' lives easier, because it reduces the work we need to do to
specify copyright information.
[1] http://dep.debian.net/deps/dep5/#index4h2
-- System Information:
Debian Release: wheezy/sid
APT prefers testing
APT policy: (990, 'testing'), (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'stable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Kernel: Linux 3.0.0-1-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.utf8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Versions of packages base-files depends on:
ii gawk [awk] 1:3.1.8+dfsg-0.1 GNU awk, a pattern scanning and pr
ii mawk [awk] 1.3.3-15 a pattern scanning and text proces
base-files recommends no packages.
base-files suggests no packages.
-- no debconf information
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