Re: DEP-5 meta: New co-driver; current issues
On Fri, 13 Aug 2010, Craig Small wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 13, 2010 at 01:27:12AM +1200, Lars Wirzenius wrote:
> > More importantly, making debian/copyright be machine parseable
> > provides some immediate benefits, without having to wait for a
> > solution to the big, difficult problem.
>
> What are these benefits?
The major important bits are that people who are basing distributions
on Debian or are using Debian in the enterprise or embedded
environments can more easily determine the set of licences that they
need to audit for compliance purposes and due dilligence. Debian will
also know better what licences we are distributing in main, and can
possibly track issues where we are unable to ship specific
derivative works.
If we work with SPDX, we'll also be able to share the effort of
producing these files with other distributions and our downstreams.
We can also utilize Fossology and some of the other tools to also
generate the copyright files and keep them updated with new releases,
eventually reducing the maintainer burden of dealing with manually
produced copyright files even further.
I hope eventually that you'll be able to just run a tool on a source
package, get a debian/copyright out of it, and maybe look at a few
files which are questionable, then have it be kept automatically
updated. If we're even luckier, upstreams will create the SPDX files
themselves, and we'll just use them to generate the copyright files.
DEP-5 itself has already been useful in seeding the creation of SPDX.
Don Armstrong
--
Your village called.
They want their idiot back.
-- xkcd http://xkcd.com/c23.html
http://www.donarmstrong.com http://rzlab.ucr.edu
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