reassign 492432 aptitude thanks Hi,
On Sat, 2008-07-26 at 07:38:31 +0530, Kumar Appaiah wrote: > Package: dpkg > Severity: wishlist > Please consider allowing a display of the copyright file of a package > via dpkg. While I am sure you will ask me why this is any different > from doing zcat /usr/share/doc/$pkg/copyright.gz, I am hinting at > something more like the way it is done in RPM: > > http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/pipermail/ilugc/2008-July/042594.html > > In essence, this may necessitate machine readable copyright format, > but I think it would be worth taking this forward. The stuff done on RPM is not good enough. Describing the whole package licensing situation in only a field is not sufficient, that's one of the reasons we have the copyright file. Making dpkg output this file while its format is not (yet) standardized, and there does not seem to be consensus that it will be in the near future, seems like not that useful, as the tools trying to analyze such output would only work if it was in a standardized format. The other problem is that the administrator is allowed (per policy) to remove anything under /usr/share/doc/, so dpkg will not be able to always output such information. > Do inform me if I need to report this elsewhere, or if this has > already been reported elsewhere. I guess a more appropriate place for this would be the front-ends, in the same way «aptitude changelog foo» shows the changelog, taking it from a remote repository even w/o needing the package to be installed, the same could be done with the copyright file (it's even on the same host). Althought the format is still a problem, and it might make sense to delay providing such an option until such format is more wide-spread. Reassigning, now you might have to convince the aptitude maintainers. :) regards, guillem -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
