On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 03:05:58PM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote: > Steve Langasek <vorlon@debian.org> writes: > > 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. > So the suggestion is to make it formatted text and recommend that the > whole field be pre-formatted text (indicated by two leading spaces)? > Hm, yes, that would work and is probably the simplest. > It occurs to me that an alternative would be to say that line-based lists > support something akin to RFC 5322 continuation semantics: if a line > starts with two or more spaces, it's taken as a continuation of the > previous line. Then you could do: > Copyright: 2001 Russ Allbery > 2004, 2005, 2011 > The Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University > and have that considered two "lines", one of which has a continuation > line. That would preserve the structured semantics, if anyone cares about > them, at the cost of introducing new syntax to line-based lists that isn't > supported by the other control fields that use line-based lists (like > Files or the checksum fields). It would preserve the capacity for structured semantics, but it would change the meaning of many files already in the wild. On that basis, I would like to avoid making such a change before 1.0 and think that "formatted text" is the best option here. Would the attached patch do the job? -- 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
=== modified file 'dep5/copyright-format.xml'
--- dep5/copyright-format.xml 2011-12-14 07:46:52 +0000
+++ dep5/copyright-format.xml 2011-12-17 07:04:26 +0000
@@ -486,12 +486,12 @@
<section id="copyright-field">
<title><varname>Copyright</varname></title>
<para>
- Line-based list: one or more free-form copyright statement(s), one
- per line. In the header paragraph, this field gives the copyright
- information for the package as a whole, which may be different or
- simplified from a combination of all the per-file copyright
- information. In the Files paragraphs, it gives the copyright
- information that applies to the files matched by the
+ Formatted text, no synopsis: one or more free-form copyright
+ statement(s), one per line. In the header paragraph, this field
+ gives the copyright information for the package as a whole, which
+ may be different or simplified from a combination of all the
+ per-file copyright information. In the Files paragraphs, it gives
+ the copyright information that applies to the files matched by the
<varname>Files</varname> pattern. If a work has no copyright holder
(i.e., it is in the public domain), that information should be
recorded here.
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