Rene Engelhard wrote:
Giacomo A. Catenazzi wrote:Joerg Jaspert wrote:The real problem here is that FTP masters require the list of copyright holders to be up-to-date each time the package goes through NEW. Whatever justification exists for this requirement, I???m starting to find it unacceptable. If a package has to go through NEW, it takes about twice as much time to update this list than to do the actual packaging work.Why is this list needed?Often the license requires it. For instance the BSD license says, "Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright".*binary*But we do distribute binaries in the debs - and debian/copyright is not only for the source but also ends up in the deb.
Yes, or better debian/copyright is *only* for the binary [1]. The sources have the original license files and all legal notices in the right place. Debian source format don't allow to remove legal notices (but recreating the orig.tar). Note: a insane developer could remove it in diff, but the original notice is still distributed in the orig.tar. The point was: we are mixing sources requirements (the part you did not quoted) with binary requirement (the quoted part). [1] Note: I did not write "the license of binary". It is fine to document all sources licenses, as an additional information for the *binary*, but sources-only requirements are not necessary in binary packages. ciao cate