Re: New DEP: Usage of SDPX in debian/copyright
Hi,
On Tue, Feb 8, 2022 at 9:31 AM Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> wrote:
>
> No one uses our RFC-2822-style thing except us, and no one has tools
> for it, so people are understandably quite reluctant to adopt it.
I agree with that assessment.
As far as I understand the situation of DEP-5 tooling, I may now have
(reluctantly) implemented in Lintian the most commonly used—and
therefore the authoritative—parser for the DEP-5 format. [1] I am only
aware of one other relevant implementation. [2]
> it really should have been (a restricted subset of) YAML
The issue with DEP-5 is not merely one of format. The standard is also
not fully specified. [3]
> My hope is that we can reuse standard data
> in a format that upstreams will start supplying, thus reducing the amount
> of Debian-specific work we need to do.
There is an opinion, possibly a minority, that the purpose of the
d/copyright file is to supply license information only for installable
packages. [4] For sources, there are other mechanisms, such as
comments or COPYRIGHT files, that are unlikely to be replaced by this
or other efforts.
Some folks even ship different copyright files with installables
generated from the same sources. [5]
Kind regards,
Felix Lechner
[1] https://salsa.debian.org/lintian/lintian/-/blob/master/lib/Lintian/Check/Debian/Copyright/Dep5.pm
[2] https://bugs.debian.org/1000319
[3] https://bugs.debian.org/969541
[4] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=672284#31
[4] https://bugs.debian.org/672284
Reply to: