I just stumbled upon this initiative:

http://www.spdx.org/

It is a way to specify the licensing and copyright information (and
more) for software packages. There is some overlap between
debian/copyright file and especially the DEP5 format. Alas, the SPDX
format is XML based, an example for GNU CoreUtils is available here (but
it seems to be buggy, it should use 'GPL-3.0+' instead of 'GPL-3.0'):

http://www.spdx.org/system/files/coreutils.rdf_.xml

Adopting something like this for an entire distribution might be useful
but will require a lot of work. Maybe the debian/copyright files could
be permitted to reference another file shipped with the package that
contains the complete information?

Possibly DEP5-compliant files could be generated from SPDX files.

I don't have any question or suggestion what to do with this, but I
thought some people here might find it interesting.

/Simon


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On 12/13/2011 09:17 AM, Simon Josefsson wrote:
> Possibly DEP5-compliant files could be generated from SPDX files.

This has come up in several DEP5 discussions over the past ~year, as
well as several recent mentions:

https://www.google.com/search?q=spdx+site%3Alists.debian.org

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Kind regards,
Michael


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