Hey Andrew On Mon, 2026-09-14 at 20:17 +1200, Andrew McMillan wrote: > > I would have the whole debian/copyright management automated. > > Well, that seems a wonderful goal, and I'm sure it's been thought of > before, but the reality is that there is very little consistency among > upstream packages that allows for it.
Sure, and that's also why maintainers are struggling. > > There are plenty of people in Debian who write tools to assist with > Debian packaging, but in our short history the DFSG team have focused > almost exclusively on reviewing, and working on tools to build packages > would not only be a distraction, it would be a conflict of interest. Just in case there's a miscomprehension here: I never said it would be DFSG responsibility (or anyone else to be honest). I don't buy the "conflict of interest" because it's not specifically on one package, but yeah it's definitely non trivial work. Still, that's something I think would benefit a lot from automation, for reasons already stated. > > > Sure, but d/copyright is mostly copy/pasting stuff from upstream > > tarball to the binary package with zero added value. And the > > potential rest is mostly done by change because maintainers aren't > > exactly lawyers so the result is at best adequate. > > While it is true that the information collated in debian/copyright is > assembled from information that is elsewhere in the upstream package, > it is precisely because that information "could be anywhere" that > having it collected into a single, known location, in a structured and > predictable format has value. Sure. Not sure it's worth the time of handling it manually. > > If you find that the work of other packagers is "inadequate", then > perhaps you should file bugs against those packages, requesting them to > do a better job, rather than proposing that the standards should not be > enforced? No, I definitely *wont* do that. I'm pretty sure the packagers do the best they can with the time they have, and since I really don't see the point (or rather, I don't think it's worth our time), I'm not inflicting that on other people. Regards, -- Yves-Alexis
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