Re: debian/copyright verbosity
On Tue, Apr 14 2009, Russ Allbery wrote:
> 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.
My take on this is that ./debian/copyright needs to document the
copyright and license information for the binary package primarily (the
people looking at source can get to that information, in the detail
they desire, themselves.
So, if a binary package contains binaries under the GPL, and
libraries under the LGPL, I will make sure that that is mentioned in
the debian/copyright file, along with the primary license notice that
came with the upstream sources.
Tracking the potentially hundreds of files with © notices that
make up the binary or the libraries is not something I am likely to
do. People looking for that information can inspect the sources, or ask
upstream, directly.
In my opinion, the most important bit of ./debian/copyright is
the license information (despite the name of the file), and how it maps
to components of the binary package. Unless a lwyer tells me I am
legally obligated t put more information than that in
./deban/copyright, or people convince me that there is value in doing
what I think is rather silly busy work, this is not going to change.
manoj
--
God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows
through. Paul Valery
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> <http://www.debian.org/~srivasta/>
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