Dear all, first of all I would like to wish a nice conference to all Debconf participants. I see a lot of enthousiasm on the mailing lists and planet.debian.org and it really looks exciting to be there.
I am not attending Debconf, but I hope that it is the good timing to send this email on my thoughts on a machine-readable license summary, so that pepole who share interest in this can have opportunity to chat on the subject in the real life rather than on this cold electroning communication channel that is so prone to misunderstandings. My main motivations as a packager for constucting a machine-readable format for license summary are the following: - Respect upstream's license, and help our users to do so. - Better use the time I spend packaging, and increase the quality of my packages. - Share my work with other distributions and Upstream. Debian has a tradition of gathering informations on license and copyrights in a specialised file, ‘copyright’, that I suppose originate on both license constraints (in particular, some licenses of the BSD family) and practical consideration (help the FTP team to review). I think that the efforts we put in maintaining this file are losing value on the long term: - It is rarely detected when this file loses its accuracy after a package update. - In contrary to our patches, manpages, desktop files and other contributions to upstream works, the copyright file does not benefit back to the Communauty. This is why I like a lot what is now called the DEP 5 format, because I see an opportunity to improve the situation. The machine-readable format for debian/copyright was originally proposed by Sam Hocevar, but after he stopped working on it, the proposal grew wild and hairy because of a combination of good brainstorming and lack of leadership. I am working on a version of the proposal that has significant changes from the original, and that can not be used as is without changing our Policy and archive rules. Nevertheless, I think it has a value because its aim is more focused. It may not necessarly be adopted, but I think that exploring that path is a good way to contribute to the shaping of DEP 5. To clearly mark the difference with the consensus-driven DEP 5, I renamed the format ‘Machine-readable license summary’. Here are some of the most significant differences. - Human readability: the format loses similarity with Debian control files, but leaves more possibility to aerate the file with spaces. Imprtantly, parsing would still be trivial or even easier than Debian control files. - Information content: everything is optional. Of course, licenses themselves are our guide. Our DPL has asked the SPI lawyers to clarify our duties with the BSD-style licenses, and the proposed format is ready for all possible outcomes. - Flexibility: The format allows free-form comments with the only condition that they do not look like starting or extending a field. This opens the possibility to have either dry styles with only formal fields, or mixed styles that would be more like a Readme with the most important information encoded in fields. - Reusability upstrem: one of the goal of the above changes is to make a format that is not too specialised, so that we could forward the license summaries upstream with good chances that they would be accepted, and later send patches when we detect undocumented changes. Making a Debian version can be matter of simply appending a few fields for the debian directory of the source package, or simply doing nothing is the license for packaging is the same as the upstream package and we agree that it is not necessary to duplicate copyright information that can be inferred from debian/changelog. I started to use this format in some of my packages, and have put my current draft in a Git repository on Alioth: http://git.debian.org/?p=users/plessy/license-summary.git;a=blob_plain;f=dep5.mdwn;hb=HEAD (You may have to set the enoding to utf8 by hand on your browser). http://packages.debian.org/changelogs/pool/main/libb/libbio-graphics-perl/current/copyright http://packages.debian.org/changelogs/pool/main/v/velvet/current/copyright http://packages.debian.org/changelogs/pool/non-free/s/seaview/current/copyright http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/debian-med/trunk/packages/staden-io-lib/trunk/debian/copyright It is not prefect, but I hope it illustrates well the above points. Some features are definitely missing, for instance managing all the BSD variants that basically differ only by the names of the people or institutions that can not be used to advertise the softare. Please do not hesitate to not answer to this email :) Especially that there is Debconf, I do not intend to start an electronic debate now. I will anyway be mostly off-line for the next four days. I really would like that the outcome of this email is simply pepole having new ideas, or reconsider about DEP 5 as a tool to make everybody's life easier, not only in Debian but also upstream and in the other distributions. Have a nice day, -- Charles Plessy Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
