Bug#883950: Next steps on "[GPL-3+]" proposal
Markus Koschany <apo@debian.org> writes:
> You appear more concerned about one parser, Lintian, than about the
> human maintainers who have to update d/copyright again. You argue that
> the maintainers have to update d/copyright anyway, I say fixing the tool
> is far more efficient because it affects far less human beings.
You seem to be assuming that Lintian is the only validating parser. One,
this is definitely not true, and two, the entire point of having a
standard for machine-readable copyright files is so that anyone can write
a parser without consulting with us first. Part of the guarantee in
creating a standard is that the interface is the standard. We should
assume there are an unknown number of implementations of that standard in
the wild and do the right thing when updating the standard so that they
can track future changes.
Also, again, no human maintainers have to update anything if they don't
want to. The 1.0 format isn't going anywhere. We would continue to
publish it; that was the agreement we reached when we versioned it in the
first place. So I don't understand your insistance that this creates work
for people.
It's possible that Lintian might ask people to switch to the new version
as some sort of lower-priority tag, but that's no more work than bumping
the Standards-Version of a package and is the sort of thing that one can
do via automated tooling or when one feels like it or even ignore without
harm for an extended period of time.
> I also recommend to avoid a discussion about new fields and considering
> the inclusion of SPDX identifiers to "solve" this issue. While I'm
> absolutely not against the latter, I believe it should be discussed in a
> separate bug report.
Yup, that's fine -- I agree that should be in a separate bug report.
> As I previously tried to explain I don't feel that there is a compelling
> reason for such a new version number because there is no severe
> backwards-incompatible change. I can see where are you coming from but
> the "consumer" is a tool called Lintian, not really impossible to solve.
Okay. I think I understand your argument and viewpoint. I'm not at all
persuaded by it, I'm afraid. We definitely need a version change for
this.
> Well, to me it looks like he didn't recognize it because there isn't any
> but let's just ask him again to be sure. (that's probably the discussion
> in #904729)
Even if he agrees with you, that doesn't change my position, just for the
record. So I'm not sure this is going to achieve what you want it to
achieve. :)
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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