Re: DEP-5: Structure for multiple copyright statements

[Lars Wirzenius <liw@liw.fi>]

On la, 2010-08-21 at 16:41 -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Ideally, I'd like to just copy and paste upstream's copyright statements
> into debian/copyright and maybe do some compaction, which leads me to
> prefer a free-form field.  Do we think that people are going to want to
> parse and extract individual copyright holders for some reason?  If so, we
> would need to standardize the format quite a bit, and I'm not sure it's
> worth it.

If it was easy, I might be interested in analyzing the years indicated
for copyrights, so I could write a little tool to notify me when things
fall out of copyright.

Oh, wait, I was living in a fantasy world for a while, one in which
copyrights actually expire.

Now that I'm awake, I'm happy to keep it free-form, at least for now. If
it turns out to be useful later, we can specify a more strict format.

(I will now go live in another fantasy world, one in which there is a
markup language for copyright statements and licenses which upstreams
regularly use.)