Re: Clarifying the mandatory contents of the Debian copyright file.

[Peter Miller <pmiller@opensource.org.au>]

On Tue, 2012-01-17 at 18:20 -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Peter Miller <peter.miller.aus@gmail.com> writes:
> 
> This objection makes me think that you believe that more information is
> required by the DEP-5 format than is in your existing debian/copyright
> files.

My understanding is that all project files are covered, although
wildcards are permitted.

Each different copyright x license combination needs its own separate
entry.

Note that "Copyright (C) 2008 Peter Miller" is different than "Copyright
(C) 2011 Peter Miller" is different than "Copyright (C) 1991, 2012 Peter
Miller", so the cross product is going to be substantial for long lived
projects, even when the number of contributors is small.  
Once the number of contributors rises "Copyright (C) 2008 Peter Miller,
plus Copyright (C) 2008 Fred Nurk" is different than "Copyright (C) 2008
Peter Miller" alone.  This means the cross product is going to explode
faster.

But wait, there's more.  A number of my projects have a subset of source
files from a second underlying project source with a compatible license
(GPL-to-GPL usually in my case) but they may have been GPL-v2+ and now I
have released them as GPL-v3+, so we have yet another source for a
larger license x copyright cross product.

I estimate that my older and larger projects are going to have
multi-megabyte debian/copyright files.  Hopefully they will compress
well as they are going to be hugely (but not trivially) redundant.

Hence, I want an automated tool.  It still gripes me that such a huge
file is unlikely to be used by, or useful to, anyone.  And, if an
automated tool *can* do it, why have the file at all?


-- 
Peter Miller <pmiller@opensource.org.au>