dep5-copyright-license-name-not-unique versus varying wording of the BSD-3-clause license
Hi all,
I work on a package (gdcm) that contains files from a variety of
sources and as a result the d/copyright file is quite large [1].
Specifically, there are various source files that are all licensed with
a BSD-3-clause license which are worded slightly differently. i.e. in
some cases the third clause is generically worded, in others it
explicitly contains names of the contributers, e.g.:
3. The name of the author may not be used to endorse or promote
products derived from this software without specific prior
written permission.
versus
* Neither name of Mathieu Malaterre, or CREATIS, nor the names of any
contributors (CNRS, INSERM, UCB, Universite Lyon I), may be used to
endorse or promote products derived from this software without
specific prior written permission.
Naturally, lintian complains about this with dep5-copyright-license
-name-not-unique, when I set the short name to BSD-3-clause for all of
these instances.
Now my question is how to deal with this? On one hand from their spirit
these are all BSD-3-clause licenses (and licensecheck reports exactly
this), on the other hand, I can not unify these texts with the generic
version, since this would mean to not properly document the wording of
some licenses in the d/copyright file.
Should I set short names to BSD-3-clause+<somename>? While this would
quell the lintian warning, I'm reluctant to invent new short names for
licenses that are simply a BSD-3-clause licenses in their meaning.
Also, I don't really see in the copyright file format manual [2] that
the same short name from the list of standard abbreviations can not be
used for different license texts if they actually represent the given
license. Maybe this aspect of DEP5 should be clarified? Currently, it
only says that "arbitrary short names are only guaranteed to be unique
within a single copyright file".
There is actually a discussion in #779676 [3] about this, but IMHO the
examples given there for different wording with the same short name
could be corrected by properly using the comments and copyright fields,
e.g. like suggested on d-mentors [4]. Unfortunately; I don't see how I
could apply this approach to my package.
I'd also like to mention that my first attempt to upload this new
version of the package was rejected by FTP master specifically pointing
out that I should take care of all lintian warning regarding "dep5
-copyright-license-name-not-unique".
Many thanks,
Gert
[1] https://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-med/trunk/packages/gdcm/tr
unk/debian/copyright?revision=20287&view=markup
[2] https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/
[3] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=779676
[4] https://lists.debian.org/debian-mentors/2015/11/msg00296.html
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