Neil Williams <codehelp@debian.org> writes: > Consensus can also be gleaned from the common practice of packages > already in main. It is extremely common to find debian/copyright > contains a single list of copyright holder details and a single > licence statement, no matter how those copyright details are actually > attributed throughout the source code. It still is the default > template from dh_make. This tells me that there is consensus on doing what everyone else has done, and consensus on reducing the amount of effort put into ‘debian/copyright’. That's not new information; I'm looking for a consensus on what that file should actually *mean*, since it's clear we don't have agreement yet. > Policy only documents existing practice - if you want to know what > Debian feels is the consensus on a packaging issue that is not > described in Policy, studying existing practice is a valid way of > discovering how to proceed with your own practice. This is true, but it's also true that without knowing the purpose of ‘debian/copyright’, the consensus will simply tend toward “don't put anything into it”. Instead, it seems more relevant to me to ask: What does the information in it mean, what is it for, and how much effort do we require of each other to maintain it? > We do not need every single stage to be laboriously mangled into > legalese for Policy. Likewise, we don't need the guidance to be so implicit that the information content spirals inexorably to zero. Now that we've got the ridiculous extremes out of the way, that presumably nobody actually supports, can we please get on with discussing what the actual position should be? -- \ “Even if the voices in my head are not real, they have pretty | `\ good ideas.” —anonymous | _o__) | Ben Finney
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