On 01/09/11 07:15, Ben Finney wrote: > > Ximin Luo <infini...@gmx.com> writes: > >> At the cost of some complexity in code, we can eliminate a lot of >> complexity in our data. > > There is redundancy, yes. Is that what you're calling complexity? Or is > there some significant complexity in the data of the ‘debian/copyright’ > file that you've got in mind? > >> With pointers, it is easier for maintainers to create simple >> debian/copyright files. > > At the cost of actually making the package more brittle: when taking > parts of a package, it is easier to omit a file than to omit part of a > file. So a reference is more complex, and prone to failure, than simply > keeping all the license information in one place. > > Now, we compromise that flexibility, in the case of *very* common > licenses which are well-known. But I don't see you making a good case > for allowing that complexity to increase. >
I don't see you or anyone else making a good case for not allowing that complexity. It's all hand-waving. Your "more brittle" point isn't true, it's easier for humans to check pointers since they don't need to scroll through a huge swathe of text, and easier to code a program to check original unformatted license texts since we don't need to bother with parsing to a canonical form. >> Since there are thousands of packages and there only needs to be a few >> DEP-5 parsers (ideally, one), the choice seems obvious to me. > > Another point of disagreement. I think that multiple competing parser > implementations for a standardised data format is healthier and more > robust than a single implementation. > >> Sure, it's "easy" to format licenses into DEP-5 long-text format, but >> each new maintainer needs to do this for themselves. > > That formatting is no different from the formatting they must already > learn for the ‘Description’ field in ‘debian/control’. Do you think > using the same formatting for another field is a significant increase in > complexity? > License texts can be quite long. You don't want to have a standard that requires humans to handle long pieces of text, especially widely-distributed license texts. Description fields are short paragraphs and each package has a different one. License texts are the exact opposite. >> In fact I might go write the tool I mentioned before and learn some >> perl in the process... that's what a lot of Debian devscripts is >> written in, right? > > Formatting a passage of text to that format would be useful, I agree, > since it could be used for the multiple metadata fields that have that > format. > That would be really really ugly pointless code and I'm not going to do that. Much easier to cp $LICENSE and cat $LICENSE. -- GPG: 4096R/5FBBDBCE https://github.com/infinity0 https://bitbucket.org/infinity0 https://launchpad.net/~infinity0
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