Dear Guillem and Aptitude maintainers, On Tue, Jul 29, 2008 at 11:58 PM, Guillem Jover wrote: >> http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/pipermail/ilugc/2008-July/042594.html >> >> In essence, this may necessitate machine readable copyright format, >> but I think it would be worth taking this forward. > > The stuff done on RPM is not good enough. Describing the whole package > licensing situation in only a field is not sufficient, that's one of > the reasons we have the copyright file. > > Making dpkg output this file while its format is not (yet) standardized, > and there does not seem to be consensus that it will be in the near > future, seems like not that useful, as the tools trying to analyze > such output would only work if it was in a standardized format.
I am in agreement with you. It would require a monumental effort in standardization. Even then, there are several exceptions and non-standard licenses which we would have to deal with. > The other problem is that the administrator is allowed (per policy) to > remove anything under /usr/share/doc/, so dpkg will not be able to > always output such information. True. >> Do inform me if I need to report this elsewhere, or if this has >> already been reported elsewhere. > > I guess a more appropriate place for this would be the front-ends, > in the same way «aptitude changelog foo» shows the changelog, taking it > from a remote repository even w/o needing the package to be installed, > the same could be done with the copyright file (it's even on the same > host). Althought the format is still a problem, and it might make > sense to delay providing such an option until such format is more > wide-spread. > > Reassigning, now you might have to convince the aptitude maintainers. :) Thanks, Guillem, for the patient explanation. I guess this may not happen in the near future, but I would still request the Aptitude maintainers to keep this option open, so that somewhere in the future, we could see such a feature come in. Of course, you guys are in a better position to judge the issue, but all the same... Thanks. Kumar -- Kumar Appaiah -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
