Releasing DEP 5 in two weeks in the absence of blocking bugs.
Le Fri, Dec 09, 2011 at 06:53:43PM +0100, Stefano Zacchiroli a écrit :
>
> - I've had a chance to discuss with the editors of the SPDX
> specification about its relationship with DEP-5. Thanks to the help of
> Dominique Dumont work is already in progress to have a mutual
> converter among the two formats. Also, although with some bumps, work
> on finalizing DEP-5 has finally restarted.
Hi Stefano,
thank you for your regular “Bits”, they help all of us to have a nice overview
of Debian, and of your hard work.
I call for marking DEP 5 accepted in two weeks if no blocking problems with the
current draft are documented as such in the BTS.
I have mixed feelings when you write “work on finalizing DEP-5 has finally
restarted”. As you can see in the BTS, the work actually did not stop, until
November 30 where we finally exhausted the list of pressing issues to make the
DEP releasable. It is still perfectable – arguably forever – and for instance
there is a proposition for English corrections that is pending, although any
English correction is by essence controversial since English is spoken and
written differently in different countries.
Perhaps during your discussion with the SPDX editors they told you how they
work. They have dedicated public mailing lists. They have a bug tracking
system. They have an agenda. They have a team of people who coordinate their
work. They released a workable 1.0 version and are working towards an improved
2.0 version, with exciting and groundbreaking changes. There is a big lesson
to take, and maybe some day we will learn from our errors and understand why
none of this was possible for DEP 5.
Particularly disruptive is the lack of use of the BTS, or at least a public
mailing list, for recording the reason why the DEP is not released yet.
Publication of DEP 5 as the machine-readable debian/copyright file format
version 1.0, through the debian-policy package and www.debian.org, is being
worked on. As your Bits indirectly but nicely remind, there is also work to do
on the debian-publicity side. For this to start, however, I feel that we need
the DEP to be accepted.
In the absence of a blocking issue reported to the BTS in two weeks, I will
re-add myself as a driver, and mark the DEP accepted.
PS: after this done, we need to seriously think if it would make sense to try
to simply merge our efforts with SPDX. We have at least one DPL and two former
DPLs in contact with them; why wouldn't Debian as a project participate ?
Have a nice day,
--
Charles Plessy
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan
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