On 28/08/11 01:06, Steve Langasek wrote: > On Sun, Aug 28, 2011 at 12:24:55AM +0100, Ximin Luo wrote: >> You missed my point. Verbatim text in copyright may be mechanically >> extractable, but not easily verifiable. It's hard in the general case to >> verify that a license block called "MPL" actually contains the full >> correct MPL text, both for machines and humans. > > First, this is only hard for humans, not hard for machines; it's *trivial* > to convert a block of license text into a case-insensitive, > whitespace-smashing normalized form for comparison. And any DEP5 parser is > going to strip out the ' .' lines as well. > Please, show us how easy it is. > Second, an important feature of the DEP5 format is the use of standard > keywords for common licenses. If you have a DEP5 debian/copyright where you > declare it's under the MPL, and the text of the license is not the MPL, > *that's a bug*, and one that can be reliably and automatically detected by > software. No software does this today, because no one has taken the time to > write it yet, but it's a problem that can be solved by writing the code > once. In the meantime, *users* can reasonably assume that if the package > declares the code to be under 'License: MPL-1.1', this is the license that > applies, without any need for long, by-hand comparison of license texts. > No need for the redundancy then, which hinders human-readability of the rest of the file. >> To re-quote myself - one might see that a package points to MPL.txt [or a >> license paragraph with the MPL header], then assume it's the MPL, but then >> <strong>why have that file [or text] there in the first place, if you're not >> going to read all of it</strong>? > > Because not everyone who cares to know what rights they have to the software > knows what the MPL is (or has its terms memorized) in the first place! > Missed my point again. In this case you should be able to read the MPL in a single shared location. Not 50 different places, which all have slightly different formatting. -- GPG: 4096R/5FBBDBCE https://github.com/infinity0 https://bitbucket.org/infinity0 https://launchpad.net/~infinity0
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