Re: making debian/copyright machine-interpretable
On Sat, Aug 04, 2007, Russ Allbery wrote:
> It overall seems reasonable to me, although it surfaces other issues that
> we've been somewhat ignoring. For example, with a format for clearly
> expressing copyrights that vary per file, it raises the question if we
> should be noting such things. Most packages that use Autoconf and friends
> have files in the distribution (the generated configure and the like)
> covered by a different license and copyright than the rest of the
> distribution, and for the most part people are not noting this in
> debian/copyright.
>
> I'd like to see a field added to explain any repackaging of the upstream
> source that was done, or an explicit statement that this should go into
> the second and subsequent lines of the Source field, since I think
> debian/copyright is the appropriate location for such information.
This is an issue I've been rather happy to ignore so far, because
it's really a lot of work for files that no one will probably ever look
at.
However, if it must really be noted which files were changed and
how, I am not sure a new field needs to be added. Actually I think the
information fits nicely in the licensing terms without changing the
format:
Files: Makefile.in autotools/* configure
Copyright: (c) 1992-2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
(c) 200X The Upstream Author
(c) 200Y The Debian Maintainer
License: $LicenseOfUpstreamSoftware, other-BSD
These files were regenerated from The Upstream Author's Makefile.am
and configure.ac by The Debian Maintainer using autoconf 2.61 and
automake 1.9.
.
The Free Software Foundation gives unlimited permission to copy,
distribute and modify the resulting files.
It is probably questionable whether the Debian maintainer is entitled
to a copyright on these files, but it is sometimes so difficult to
rebootstrap a source tree that I wouldn't be surprised one would argue
so. Anyway, it could also be removed.
Regards,
--
Sam.
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