Re: DEP-5 meta: New co-driver; current issues
On pe, 2010-08-13 at 11:39 -0400, Joey Hess wrote:
> However, there is a big, big problem with DEP-5, and it is named
> /usr/share/doc/chromium-browser/copyright. It is 1.3 mb in size (out of
> a 25 mb package), and completely unreadable and unusable. It appears to
> be machine generated, and is full of redundancies and useless
> information. (So I am very skeptical of claims that we should
> machine-generate copyright files.) It could probably be replaced by a
> hand-written file of about 20k. IMHO, we should not allow such
> unnecessarily complicated copyright files in Debian.
Ouch. Yes, the chromium-browser debian/copyright file does not seem sane
to me. If an automatic tool is used to generate it, it should take care
to minimize the size, right now there is a lot of duplication there, and
that's silly.
I doubt that is fixable in DEP-5, though. If they didn't use a
machine-parseable format, the could just generate a similar free-form
file, with the same amount of repetition.
(The root problem seems to me to be that chromium-browser is an
aggregation of a large amount of code from other projects. I don't think
that's a sustainable way of developing software in the long run. It
might work for one project at a time, but it harms the ecosystem.)
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