On Fri, 2007-07-27 at 08:05 -0500, Tom "spot" Callaway wrote:
- To keep using "GPL or Artistic" for perl doesn't make much sense to
me, since we are trying to differentiate clearly the different GPL versions. Is it "GPLv2+ or Artistic"? "GPLv2 or Artistic"?
This is a valid point, but I can already hear the perl packagers screaming again. :)
- If we use only " and " and " or " (with spaces around them), wouldn't
the field still be reliably parseable, yet easier to read? And more coherent with the "GPL* or Artistic" from the perl packages?
My concern about having scripts that try to parse "and" or "or" as a separator is that we have to be especially careful about license short identifiers. No "Random", "Korn", "Floor", (or to give an actual relevant example, "Condor", which is currently in the list). Using && and || prevents us from having parsing mistakes. I suppose we could parse on _and/_or...but even then, a hypothetical "Andover" license would throw us off. It's still doable, we'd just have to be very careful how it is implemented.
Oh, come on, \band\b is not that hard. Using some awkward notation is making the life of every packager harder, for the benefit of the one person who implements the parser.