On pe, 2010-08-13 at 08:04 +0000, Sune Vuorela wrote:
> On 2010-08-13, Lars Wirzenius <liw@liw.fi> wrote:
> > On pe, 2010-08-13 at 09:08 +1000, Craig Small wrote:
> >> I tried to use it once on one program and just ditched it. It only made
> >> it more difficult for me and for anyone who read it.
> >
> > That would indicate there is a bug in the DEP-5 spec. It is, in my very
> > non-humble opinion, not acceptable for DEP-5 to make it harder to
> > maintain debian/copyright in DEP-5 format than as a free-form one,
> > except for minimal markup. It seems that the process so far has created
>
> I like to offer people to try to do a DEP-5 based copyright file for
> e.g. src:kdebase-workspace, even the overhead from 'minimal markup' is
> actually ending up as quite a big thing.
Here's a quick-and-dirty conversion to DEP-5, which took about an hour
to do, using regular expression search&replace, the vi "." command, plus
manual editing:
http://files.liw.fi/dep5-long-example.txt
Some statistics:
original dep5
bytes 64053 38853
words 7098 3363
lines 1796 1100
The DEP-5 version is shorter, without (I think) sacrificing precision.
It saves space by avoiding repeating boilerplate text such as "The full
text of the GNU General Public License version 2 is available on Debian
systems in /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-2." every time the license is
used for a module.
Now, I admit that my DEP-5 version is a) quite dirtily created b) in
need of review and c) certainly incorrect. I did not, for example,
bother to fix up all lists of file specification to handle exceptions.
I claim, however, that DEP-5 is not going to make it larger.
The original file already had some markup, using some markup language
(not sure which, but similar in spirit to resturctured text and
markdown, and it might have been one of them). Also, there was something
that looked like markup for lists of files. You might be able to write a
script to convert from your markup to the DEP-5 one.
Whether you want to do that or not is of course up to you. Whether you
want to use DEP-5 or not is up to you. I don't care. To me, this idea
that DEP-5 has a massive over head now a equestrian zombie.