On Mon, Dec 12, 2011 at 02:50:17PM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote: > I noticed in reviewing another patch that the Copyright header is a > line-based list. One unfortunate implication of that is that this means > lines are required to be longer than 80 columns if the name of the > copyright holder is long. For example: > Copyright: 2004, 2009, 2011 The Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University > Previously in DEP-5-converted files, I've been writing that the same way > that I usually write it elsewhere, namely: > Copyright: 2004, 2009, 2011 > The Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University > > but formally that's two separate lines, one that doesn't have a copyright > holder and one that doesn't have a date. Yes, I noticed this myself when preparing the patch. :) On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 10:14:37AM +0900, Charles Plessy wrote: > among the four “types of values” defined, only “line-based list” preserves > all newlines at any step of the data flow. Using the other muliti-line > type, “formatted text”, one would need to prevent word wrapping by > separating each copyright notice with escaped empty lines, or to ensure > they are displayed verbatim by starting each line by at least two spaces. Good point. On the other hand, while a "formatted text" field type *may* be reflowed for display, is there any software doing that today wrt DEP5? Maybe it's enough to rely on the absence of such formatting in DEP5 parsers for the time being; if and when something starts to care about formatting the Copyright field, we can always scan the archive to detect files that look like they'll wind up formatted poorly. And of course, anyone who cares about formatting to this degree can always add that extra space at the front of the line. I notice, in fact, that all our examples of multi-line Copyright: fields in the draft already do this. > Given that there is no easy and systematic way to associate specific > copyright notices with specific files, my personal opinion is that for the > 1.0 version, it is safer to consider the whole field free-form, under the > “line-based list” syntax, but without its syntactic implications. I find this overloading of "line-based list" unsatisfactory. On balance, I would prefer to see it made a "formatted text" field. > If there is agreement, perhaps the current draft could be amended to reflect > this. It is a normative change, but that will not invalidate any existing > file. I agree that bugfixing this is worthwhile right now since it doesn't invalidate existing files; I only prefer a different bugfix. -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/ slangasek@ubuntu.com vorlon@debian.org
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