Re: DEP-5 meta: New co-driver; current issues
On 08/12/2010 03:27 PM, Lars Wirzenius wrote:
> 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.)
Its nothing that could be done by improving the format.
Especially in large projects you often have a lot of weird situations reagrding
the licensing, or GPL with various exceptions (not only to allow linking ssl,
there are many more...) and a lot of other weirdness. For me its just faster to
describe the situation in human-parsable words and copy+paste the license.
For small sources or largish sources with one developer and one license it
should not make a difference in the time one needs to spend to write
debian/copyright. Don't understand me wrong, I'm all in favor for making
debian/copyright machine-readable, I just think that there are more important
things to do when you have to decide what to do with your spare time.
>> - 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.
Good.
>
>> - 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.
True, but to gain some benefit you'd need a lot of DEP-5'ed packages to have
something useful to work on. Are there any statistics about the number of
packages which use DEP5 in d/copyright?
--
Bernd Zeimetz Debian GNU/Linux Developer
http://bzed.de http://www.debian.org
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