Re: debian/copyright verbosity

[Matthias Julius <lists@julius-net.net>]

Noah Slater <nslater@tumbolia.org> writes:

> On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 07:27:33PM +1000, Ben Finney wrote:
>> > 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.
>
> Likewise, I had never thought of this use before, but now it has been explained
> I don't think I have a problem with it. My expectation for the Copyright field
> has been widened significantly following recent discussion, to the point where I
> no longer consider it necessary at all. Given this position, it is not hard for
> me to appreciate that you might want to collapse any copyright statements down
> into one File stanza for convenience.

I would say that the former interpretation applies.  Files: *.c means
that all files that mach the pattern are covered in this section of
the copyright file.  And I believe everyone agrees that a following
License: GPL2+ then applies to all of those files.

The question is to me what a Copyright: stanza really means.  A
copyright statement in a source file does not imply that every person
mentioned has a copyright on every line of the file.  It means that
every person has a copyright on some portion of the file (that the
program authors have deemed siginficant enough to mention the person
at all).  And I think it is perfectly fine to expand that principle to
debian/copyright and say that each person mentioned in the Copyright:
stanzas has a copyright to some portion of the files specified in
Files: - and not necessarily every file.

Matthias