Hi, braghe fustagno wrote: > Please add a new column field "License" to display (and filter by) > software license (MIT/GPLv2/BSD/...). Thank you
While this is technically possible with the machine-readable DEP5 format of the debian/copyright file, it's far more complex than just adding a column to display: 0) It should be decided how such a field looks like in case there's not only a single license type involved. 1) dpkg-buildpackage needs to extract the data at build time and put it into the binary package's meta data. 2) dak (Debian Archive Kit, the software which puts together the package lists and APT repos) needs to put this information into the Packages files in the archive. 3) libapt-pkg needs to recognize these new fields inside the Packages files and offer a way to access them. 4) aptitude needs to use that libapt-pkg functionality to display the field's value. I wonder if it's worth all this effort: Debian guarantees that all software in main is under a Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) compatible license. Except when your planning to do changes to software packaged in Debian, the actual license should not have any impact on the end user. But since Debian is primarily a binary package distribution, modifying the software means handling source packages. And at least aptitude knows very little about source packages. Then again, there is the debtags project (https://debtags.debian.org/) which already gathers additional meta-data about packages. I wonder if it wouldn't be much easier to automatcally add license tags to debtags based on DEP5-format debian/copyright files. Aptitude can also display debtags and filter by debtags. Enrico (Rossi) or Enrico (Zini), any comments on this? Would a new, automatically filled license:: category make sense? Regards, Axel -- ,''`. | Axel Beckert <[email protected]>, http://people.debian.org/~abe/ : :' : | Debian Developer, ftp.ch.debian.org Admin `. `' | 4096R: 2517 B724 C5F6 CA99 5329 6E61 2FF9 CD59 6126 16B5 `- | 1024D: F067 EA27 26B9 C3FC 1486 202E C09E 1D89 9593 0EDE _______________________________________________ Aptitude-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/aptitude-devel
