Guillem Jover <[email protected]> writes: > These are the set of changes I keep doing to the debian/copyright files > I end up touching. While some could be characterized as a subjective > style issue, I've tried to give as close as possibly objective :) > rationale for every and each of the changes in the commit messages which > I'll summarize here.
Thanks! I have applied these changes for the next release except for patch 0002 (applying wrap-and-sort -sat). I agree with patch 0002 for Files, but unfortunately I believe it's incorrect for Copyright. You're treating Copyright as if it were a line-based list field, but for better or worse (I think probably for worse) the current specification says that it's a formatted field. This means that your change to, for example: Copyright: 2008 John Doe <[email protected]> 2007 Jane Smith <[email protected]> 2007 Joe Average <[email protected]> 2007 J. Random User <[email protected]> means that the semantic content of that field is now: 2008 John Doe <[email protected]> 2007 Jane Smith <[email protected]> 2007 Joe Average <[email protected]> 2007 J. Random User <[email protected]> and a format-aware display engine should show it as such. This is the reason why lines are indented: that makes them verbatim lines per the formatting specification in https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-controlfields#s-f-description I would agree with changing the definition of Copyright to a line-based list, although in order to do so we'd have to figure out the implications of a format change in the specification, and we should also flesh out the definition of a line-based list to explain how to handle a line that's longer than the normal wrap length. (In retrospect, I really regret not supporting YAML as the syntax for this file. I know YAML has a lot of problems, but it provides an unambiguous representation of constructions like this, whereas deb822 has a lot of gaps.) I would happily apply a version of 0002 that only changes Files and leaves Copyright alone. -- Russ Allbery ([email protected]) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
