Christian PERRIER <bubulle@debian.org> writes: > While building packages that have pending changes, I noticed the > newly-introduced lintian warning about "no machine-readable > debian/copyright file". > > Fixing this should be easy....as long as one *does* find copyrights in > the files provided by a given package. > > For instance: > > bubulle@sesostris:~/src/debian/debian-installer/trunk/packages/partman-efi(master) $ licensecheck -r --copyright * > bubulle@sesostris:~/src/debian/debian-installer/trunk/packages/partman-efi(master) $ > > What is the recommended practice in such case? > > Go through the git commit log and pick changes one by one and assign > the copyright to the relevant person in the relevant file (which is > something that has to be automated in order to be doable)? That would produce a list that is too long, but perhaps that does not really matter -- do we need to care about the fact that someone who has only fixed a spelling mistake almost certainly does not have copyright, because a court would judge that their contribution was insufficiently creative? If all we're worried about is that the list includes all the people that do have copyright, that seems fine to me, but perhaps having people listed who have no standing would make life difficult for lawyers trying to enforce the GPL, so should be avoided -- I'm not sure. Also, it seems fairly likely that someone that makes some very minor contributions to one file will almost always have done something copyrightable elsewhere in the code, so perhaps we'd find that the list of people is pretty accurate, but some of them are getting somewhat inflated lists of files over which they have copyright. Really, I don't see to much problem with lumping the names of anyone that's ever touched the codebase together in one big list, and saying that they are the copyright holders for the whole lot -- unless there are bits with differing licenses, which should be done separately. If anyone needs to care about the finer details, then they can do the work when it's needed. We could include a Comment: nearby pointing out that if anyone finds the need to make the information more granular, patches would be very welcome. Cheers, Phil. -- |)| Philip Hands [+44 (0)20 8530 9560] HANDS.COM Ltd. |-| http://www.hands.com/ http://ftp.uk.debian.org/ |(| Hugo-Klemm-Strasse 34, 21075 Hamburg, GERMANY
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