Re: TL 2008, Debian perl scripts and creation of debian/copyright
Hm,
finding this e-mail in my draft folder I wonder whether I haven't
already sent it? Anyway, here it goes again.
Norbert Preining <preining@logic.at> wrote:
> Hi Frank,
>
> On Fr, 18 Apr 2008, Frank Küster wrote:
>> I would like to put some effort in further cleaning up the copyright
>> status of TeXLive before the release, and I was wondering whether one of
>
> If you think that is useful, please do so.
I definitely think; if we're honest, we must say that we can expect some
RC bugs being hidden in the unclear copyright status.
>> the (more fun parts) of doing that should be to convert our generated
>> copyright file to the machine-readable format on which the project seems
>> to have agreed upon.
>
> That is *NO* obligation,
That's correct; however I think if a package has a complicated copyright
file with a defined format that only allows it to be understood, then it
better use a format that others use, too.
> I consider it of really *minor* use to invest
> time into making something machine readable, since machines cannot
> assess a copyright anyway, so someone has to read it at the end.
Maybe that's not even true: Since we are able to machine-generate the
copyright file and check whether all included files are covered, why
should not someone else be able to parse and analyse it?
Moreover, it's not just about being machine-readable, but also about
having a (not-yet-so-well-)known format.
> Really, I consider it useless spent time if you would do that. But if
> you think so, please do.
Well, it would be more because having some coding task along with just
checking licenses is more fun...
Apropos checking licenses: Do you somehow keep track of license issues?
I remember that a couple of months ago, some package was reported as
being non-free, and after contacting the author a fixed version was
uploaded to CTAN. Back then, I asked whether it had been recorded in the
catalogue, and you said like, "No, it's enough to have the fixed version
on CTAN". I definitely disagree with that - knowing how much unclear
licenses were discovered and cleared up multiple times in Debian
packages -, but I didn't contradict. Instead I marked the message as
"Frank you should do something here", but somehow the mark got lost...
>> Will the different upstream organisation of TeXLive 2008 (e.g. because
>> tpm files are gone) mean that we have to rewrite our packaging from
>> scratch? Or will there still be tpm files for convenience?
>
> There will be no tpm files, but allthe license stuff is currently taken
> from the tpmliclines files, and I can always recreate this file also
> from the new infrastructure. And the rest has to be rewritten anyway,
> makes me already a bit nervous ...
Ah, I understand.
Regards, Frank
--
Frank Küster
Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)
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