Bug#883950: Next steps on "[GPL-3+]" proposal

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

Markus Koschany <apo@debian.org> writes:

> Please keep it simple. I disagree that we would need a version bump of
> copyright format 1.0 which had to be documented in every
> debian/copyright file again by changing the Format field. A simple
> amendment would also do the trick which could be referenced by the
> Policy and our copyright format 1.0 document.

Well, I gave my reason why I think we need a version bump.  Could you
explain why you think it's not necessary with a more specific discussion
that answers that analysis?

> Updating a single tool, a parser like Lintian, is far more efficient
> than updating ten thousands of source packages again.

They don't have to update the version unless they want to use the new
feature, at which point they're being modified anyway.  I would expect to
have 1.0-format files in the archive for years, and that's fine.  That's
the reason why there's a version number.

The first version bump is always the hardest, but if we're going to have a
version number at all, we should bump it when we make
backward-incompatible changes.  The whole point to having a version number
is to change it when something changes that a consumer needs to be aware
of.

> Please also read what Joerg Jaspert has written in

> https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=883950#80

> again. Even the ftp-masters prefer a keep it simple solution and they
> support our proposal to reduce boilerplate.

I don't think Joerg recognized the backwards-compatibility issue.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>