Package: base-files Version: 6.5 Followup-For: Bug #487201 Hi, I'm going to re-open this discussion and present this argument from more perspectives than simply "number of packages".
I've been trying to package a bunch of mozilla extensions and getting used to all the book-keeping that debian packages need, much of which is copyright. I read DEP-5 and have been working on getting my debian/copyright files to conform to that standard. However, one major annoyance is the inclusion of verbatim licenses, in particular MPL-1.1. The "correct" way (according to a strict interpretation of debian policy and DEP-5) to do this is to include MPL-1.1 verbatim within a License: paragraph, which means you need to indent every single line by one space, and fill in the blank lines with a "." character. The "hardcore" geeks will say "oh you can write a sed script to do that easily", but this takes some mental effort, so not surprisingly people have come up with their ad-hoc solutions to this, usually involving including MPL.txt or somesuch in the /doc/ folder. The problem is that everyone does this in slightly different ways, so it becomes very hard to extract this information mechanically. Additionally, it creates more work for anyone reviewing the copyright of packages. Sure, one might see that a package points to MPL.txt, then assume it's the MPL, but then <strong>why have that file there in the first place, if you're not going to read all of it</strong>? That seems ridiculous and counter to the point of having a format that's supposed to make copyright info machine-parseable. In short, having a shared place for widely-used licenses (such as all the ones mentioned in [1]), would be extremely useful to the goal of MACHINE-PARSEABLE COPYRIGHT, simply because it eliminates a crap load of unnecessary redundancy, that humans and machines then do not have to read or verify. It also makes package maintainers' lives easier, because it reduces the work we need to do to specify copyright information. [1] http://dep.debian.net/deps/dep5/#index4h2 -- System Information: Debian Release: wheezy/sid APT prefers testing APT policy: (990, 'testing'), (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'stable'), (1, 'experimental') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Kernel: Linux 3.0.0-1-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores) Locale: LANG=en_GB.utf8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash Versions of packages base-files depends on: ii gawk [awk] 1:3.1.8+dfsg-0.1 GNU awk, a pattern scanning and pr ii mawk [awk] 1.3.3-15 a pattern scanning and text proces base-files recommends no packages. base-files suggests no packages. -- no debconf information -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
