Am 03.08.2018 um 00:59 schrieb Russ Allbery: > Markus Koschany <a...@debian.org> writes: > >> You appear more concerned about one parser, Lintian, than about the >> human maintainers who have to update d/copyright again. You argue that >> the maintainers have to update d/copyright anyway, I say fixing the tool >> is far more efficient because it affects far less human beings. > > You seem to be assuming that Lintian is the only validating parser. One, > this is definitely not true, and two, the entire point of having a > standard for machine-readable copyright files is so that anyone can write > a parser without consulting with us first. Part of the guarantee in > creating a standard is that the interface is the standard. We should > assume there are an unknown number of implementations of that standard in > the wild and do the right thing when updating the standard so that they > can track future changes.
I have a hard time to imagine what kind of breakage might occur with those non-Lintian parsers. We just have to check whether a short license identifier is also a common-license, if true, do not write a standalone paragraph and do not add boilerplate statements like "On Debian systems you can find..." to the license field anymore. I believe you overstate the impact of this change on tools and a pragmatical solution would be absolutely fine in this case. > Also, again, no human maintainers have to update anything if they don't > want to. The 1.0 format isn't going anywhere. We would continue to > publish it; that was the agreement we reached when we versioned it in the > first place. So I don't understand your insistance that this creates work > for people. I personally dislike the trend in Debian to create more and more complexity in our source packages. I find the Standards-Version field unnecessary, VCS fields should not be part of a debian/control file, all DFSG licenses approved by our ftp-team should be listed in /usr/share/common-licenses and maintainers allowed to reference them, simple clarifications for copyright format 1.0 elements should not require a separate document 1.1 and so on. I have noticed that you are always in the opposite camp and a proponent for more complexity. I believe this kind of perfectionism makes it more and more difficult to change even smaller details in Debian. For me #883950 and this proposal is a no-brainer and should have been handled much more gracefully. It's not about changing a number that creates work, it is all that bureaucratic stuff that I have mentioned which adds up to my frustration about our current workflows. [...] > Okay. I think I understand your argument and viewpoint. I'm not at all > persuaded by it, I'm afraid. We definitely need a version change for > this. > >> Well, to me it looks like he didn't recognize it because there isn't any >> but let's just ask him again to be sure. (that's probably the discussion >> in #904729) > > Even if he agrees with you, that doesn't change my position, just for the > record. So I'm not sure this is going to achieve what you want it to > achieve. :) I'm not surprised that I can't convince you but for the sake of other Policy bug reporters, I suggest that you make your decision making process more transparent in the future. For instance I was asked by one Policy editor to contact the ftp-team, which are the authoritative body in Debian when it comes to licenses, I got the OK for my proposal but now it is blocked by another Policy editor who subtly implies that the resolution of this bug depends solely on him. It would have saved us time and effort if we got that straight right from the start. Regards, Markus
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