Re: debian/copyright for files not part of the binary packages?
Le Sun, Jul 20, 2008 at 07:13:19PM +0200, Thomas Viehmann a écrit :
> The reject FAQ has been featured on d-d-announce[1], is linked from the
> NEW queue page and, AFAIK, referred to in most if not all rejection
> mails from Joerg.
> you could always suggest patches.
Hi Thomas,
This exactly exemplifies what I meant: compare to the Debian Policy:
- It is a structured document,
- It is packaged and can be consulted offline,
- Discussion about its content follow a public procedure that takes
advantage of the Bug Tracking System.
Patches would improve the FAQ, but what we need is a policy that would
state the requrements for a package in Debian format to be accepted in
Debian and in the contrib and non-free catagories, and that would be
displayed together with the other policies.
It would also be good to clarify the responsabilities of each persons.
Who has the legal liability? The member of the FTP master team member
accepting the package, the FTP master team collectively, the FTP
administrators and the package maintainer, the package maintainer alone?
A lot of the weight that the members of the FTP master team have in the
discussion is that it is assumed that they take risks for the
communauty, that can not be shared with others.
The discussion also shows that we are reaching the limits of a system.
The outcome is clearly that undocumented and non-free material goes
accepted through the NEW queue. Documenting the copyright of all files
in a machine-readable format can definitely help to make automated
tests, but as Russ reminded, the most time consuming part of making a
Debian package is to document the licence of the files. (And for the
specific field I focus in, I would add: deal with PDF documents that
miss their LaTeX or MS Word source). I do not know if Debexpo (a
replacement for mentors.debian.net that is one of the Google Summer of
Code projects allocated to Debian) could help for this: if it had
discussion facilities, then packages could be peer-reviewed before
upload to NEW ?
Have a nice day,
--
Charles Plessy
Debian-Med packaging team,
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan
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