Hi. I wrote the following some time ago to Lars and Steve. The former asked be to rather put it up for general discussion (which I forgot then somehow). So here it is...
Please note, that this may be outdated by now, but I couldn't check the current revision, as http://dep.debian.net/deps/dep5/ seems do be down. Cheers, Chris. May I give some comments to DEP5 (r136). 1) The description of the License field says: >Otherwise, this field should either include the full text >of the license(s) or include a pointer to the license file under >`/usr/share/common-licenses`. This could be interpreted as if just the pointer would be enough, which is however (AFAIU) not what is meant by the policy 12.5, which says a verbatim copy must be included and the pointer is (AFAIU) just something that should be given in addition?! 2) In general it might be worth suggest that pointer being given in the Comment field, IMO it's not really part of the license. e.g. >Comment: On Debian systems, the full text of the “GNU General Public License > version 3” can be found in the file > “/usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-3”. But then one would possibly also need to allow the Comment field for the stand-alone License paragraphs. 3) Just a cosmetic/perfectionist issue: People would probably simply use the examples in DEP5 for the formulation of their pointers, currently: >On Debian systems, the full text of the GNU General Public License version 2 can be found in the file `/usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-2'. may I suggest, as we have UTF-8 and so anyway to use the "right" quotation marks, and perhaps also to quote the name of the license, so that we'd have: >On Debian systems, the full text of the “GNU General Public License version 2” can be found in the file “/usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-2”. HTH, Chris.
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