Re: Licenses not in /usr/share/common-licenses
On Tue, May 8, 2012 at 1:49 PM, Matthew Woodcraft wrote:
> Russ Allbery wrote:
>> I think the core question is: why is base-files special? Yes, it's
>> essential and all, but that doesn't address the case of packages being
>> downloaded separate from Debian, or unpacked by hand, in which case we
>> don't include a license. If we're legally fine with that, I'm having a
>> hard time seeing the clear distinction between that and a dependency
>> on another package including the license.
>
>> Surely this has been discussed before? I don't remember seeing it on
>> the debian-policy list since I started working on Policy.
>
> There's a fairly lengthy discussion starting at
> http://lists.debian.org/debian-policy/2000/11/msg00235.html
So, I think [0] is the most astute message in that thread.
Succinctly, the copyright file itself is irrelevant in the source
package since the upstream source should have all of that information
already, and at least for the GPL you can distribute source packages
as is. Thus, the issue is reduced to the need for full license texts
only in all binary packages.
That doesn't seem to be a current requirement and copyright file
symlinks are often used today, so perhaps a first step would be to
make that a part of the Debian policy?
Secondly, since the copyright file in the source package doesn't
actually need full license text, license file references should be
allowable there; as long as appropriate helpers are written that can
take those (reference only) source copyright files and fill in the
appropriate full license texts for the binary files that it generates.
Eliminating the tedium of copying, pasting, and reformatting license
texts would be a wonderful simplification and time reducer.
Best wishes,
Mike
[0] http://lists.debian.org/debian-policy/2000/11/msg00251.html
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