This seems a useful summary: Neil Williams <codehelp@debian.org> writes: > Does Files: *.c mean that everything below applies equally to all > files that match the pattern or does it mean that the statement > includes a summary of all files that match the pattern? Before this thread, I was under the unquestioning assumption that the former interpretation was the only one. The question has never, to my knowledge, been raised explicitly like this before. I'd like to know what the consensus of the Debian project is on the question. Full response below. Neil Williams <codehelp@debian.org> writes: > Ben Finney <ben+debian@benfinney.id.au> wrote: > > > (the discussion seems to have some new wrinkles, so including > > ‘debian-devel’ again) > > OK, but probably best to drop -mentors at this stage. No problem. […] > AFAICT it is perfectly acceptable for debian/copyright to collapse > those to: > > > Files: *.c > > Copyright: 2006, 2008 Mr. X > > Copyright: 2005 Mr. Y > > License: GPL2+ > > There is no collapsing of the years - each year is described > separately. > > The copyright is retained and each file is listed in debian/copyright > under the correct licence. That's pedantically true, perhaps, but only in the sense that I can say the entire works of Shakespeare are retained in the keys on a keyboard. The relevant question, it seems to me, is whether the information is preserved usefully. > You seem to be proposing an absurd exaggeration of wildcard semantics. I'm discussing what seems to me the only logical interpretation of the existing semantics. Whether those semantics need to be changed is a separate matter; it's new to me that there is even another way to interpret these semantics. > Does Files: *.c mean that everything below applies equally to all > files that match the pattern or does it mean that the statement > includes a summary of all files that match the pattern? Before this thread, I was under the unquestioning assumption that the former interpretation was the only one. The question, to my knowledge, has never been raised explicitly like this before. I'd like to know what the consensus of Debian is on the question. > If I do ls *.c, the wildcard means that I want a summary of all files > that match the pattern, I do not intend ls to interrogate the files to > see if they are identical in content prior to testing the pattern. Sure, but that's because ‘ls’ isn't in the business of interrogating the content of the files. If you, for example, ‘cat *.c’, you *are* asking for the operation to be done on all the files at once. Likewise for any command: it applies the operation to all the files that match the glob, and doesn't distinguish a subset. I don't see how that analogy can lead you to treat a copyright statement differently for a subset of files in the glob. > It does not confer anything in the reverse case, it does not mean that > the matching patterns have any relationship to each other other than > the pattern. Matching * simply means that the file is one of the set of > files that match the pattern - it does not follow that every statement > about those files applies equally to all matches, other than that they > all match the pattern. Then what can it usefully mean to apply a single group of statements to an undistinguished glob of files? If you're not intending the whole statement to apply to the whole glob, I don't see what the reader can usefully interpret it to mean in the absence of extra information — which seems counter to your purpose, as I understand it. > Not at all, debian/copyright is not about the claim, it is about the > summary of what claims exist. The claims themselves cannot be divorced > from the source code What do you mean, they cannot be divorced? The trivial sense of this is obviously false, since one certainly can construct the (glob, year, holder) tuples unambiguously, external to the source code. So I assume you don't mean that, but I don't know what you *do* mean. > > But that's not what I see going on in the hypothetical collations > > presented here > > (These are far from hypothetical, hundreds of packages already use > such collations.) Yes. My meaning was only that the original poster presented hypothetical data. > You're reading something different into the * wildcard. > > *.c does not mean that everything applies equally to every file, it > means that for the files that match the pattern, the following > copyright statements may apply - i.e. a summary. I don't see anything > wrong with that. Before we get to whether it's wrong in the sense of “acceptable”, whence does this interpretation come? It's certainly new to me, and incompatible with what I understood the meaning of the information in ‘debian/copyright’. > Do you have any concept of the amount of work that your claims about > debian/copyright would actually entail? Yes. That doesn't mean I can see how your interpretation is compatible with what seems to me to be a commonly-held understanding of the way the information in ‘debian/copyright’ is to be interpreted. If your proposed interpretation is the intended one, I'd like to see that made more explicit: both that the project as a whole agrees with that interpretation, and that the meaning of the information in that file is more explicitly communicated. > > You seem to be advocating that ‘debian/copyright’ is not, itself, > > making any specific copyright claims beyond “some combination of > > these holders, these years, and these files, have some set of > > copyright associations; > > Absolutely. Why, then, put such a vague statement into the file at all? What is the useful threshold of summarisation? These are questions it has never occurred to me might need to be asked, but your interpretation makes them necessary. > > I think that side of the argument does have some basis, though, and > > a GR on this issue seems like it might be more worthwhile than I > > previously considered. > > Please, no GR. […] Some means of achieving consensus, then. (Which may, of course, be possible simply by discussing it in ‘debian-devel’.) > There needs to be a balance here - there is no good reason for > debian/copyright to list thousands of email addresses. There is even > less reason for that list to be precisely and accurately broken down > to email addresses per source code file. By the same token of saving effort, there also needs to be clear guidance on what the Debian project considers is, and is not, required in the ‘debian/copyright’ file. It's apparent from the ongoing discussion that right now we don't have sufficient such guidance; I hope we can get there. -- \ “Roll dice!” “Why?” “Shut up! I don't need your fucking | `\ *input*, I need you to roll dice!” —Luke Crane, demonstrating | _o__) his refined approach to play testing, 2009 | Ben Finney
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