Re: debian/copyright verbosity
Ben Finney <ben+debian@benfinney.id.au> writes:
> Matthias Julius <lists@julius-net.net> writes:
>> It is exactly what you would get if someone would merge the three files
>> into one. Suddenly, the copyright statements cover the whole of the
>> contents of all three files and you couldn't knwow anymore what is by
>> whom. Would the copyright statement be less true?
> But, in the proposed scenario, that *hasn't happened*. How is it a
> useful preservation of information to falsely assume that an event has
> occurred when writing ‘debian/copyright’, or to ignore the distinction
> of whether it has or not?
It's not a useful preservation of information. It's a useful preservation
of package maintainer *time* to not bother preserving information that is
expensive and time-consuming to maintain and that practically no one cares
about.
This is the same principle behind the previous discussion about the
pointlessness of trying to track down every copyright holder when the
license doesn't require doing so and when it makes no practical difference
for what you can do with the package.
If we wanted to be absolutely faithful in preserving all information about
upstream copyright and licensing in the debian/copyright file, we could
just put a tarball of the entire upstream source in there. The
conversation is all about where to draw the line between obviously absurd
completeness and insufficient data.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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