brainstorming for UDS-N - Application Developers

[Scott Kitterman]

On Wednesday, October 06, 2010 09:25:24 am Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
> Krzysztof Klimonda wrote on 05/10/10 16:04:
> >...
> >
> > But yes, we could make the process easier - there actually has been
> > some work being done on this front in Debian. The DEP-5 proposal
> > (machine readable debian/copyright) would also make it possible to
> > generate copyright file from the IDE - most projects are fairly simple
> > in license terms anyway.
> 
> It would also let Ubuntu Software Center be more specific than just
> saying "License: Open source".

DEP-5 makes debian/copyright substantially more complex to get right.  It adds 
lots of formating requirements and rules to what is already a non-trivial 
piece of packaging to get right.  In time, we can probably develop tools to 
offset this additional complexity, but in the short run, DEP-5 requirements 
will make packaging for Ubuntu more painful, not less (and it's perfectly 
possible to generate a non-DEP-5 debian/copyright from an IDE too.  DEP-5 is 
not a pre-requisite for it.

Scott K