Re: DEP-5 meta: New co-driver; current issues
On to, 2010-08-12 at 14:59 +0200, Bernd Zeimetz wrote:
> On 08/12/2010 02:45 PM, Lars Wirzenius wrote:
> > It would be good to have DEP-5 done quite early in the squeeze+1
> > development cycle to give as much time as possible for adoption.
>
> A few comments:
> - Personally I find the format unnecessarily complicated and much more annoying
> to use than writing a normal debian/copyright file, especially for complicated
> cases.
You're not required to use it. If you want to improve the format, please
make concrete proposals, or at least explain why it is complicated and
annoying. (If you've already done so, a URL will be sufficient. I do
not, unfortunately, have the time to re-read three years worth of old
discussions about this.)
> - Migrating all packages to the new format is an insane task which would take a
> *long* time and a lot of work.
There is no goal to migrate all packages. That's a strawman.
> - Instead of writing such files (and keeping them updated), we should put more
> energy into doing this task automatically.
It is obviously true that it would be good to make all of this reliably
automated. However, even when that is done, it's useful to have things
in one place in a Debian package, i.e. debian/copyright, and it'll still
be useful for that place to be machine parseable.
More importantly, making debian/copyright be machine parseable provides
some immediate benefits, without having to wait for a solution to the
big, difficult problem.
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