Re: copyright precision
On Mon, 15 Aug 2016 at 18:17:52 +0200, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
> The problem we're having here is clearly about *tooling*. If we had a
> good toolchain to compile and audit machine-readable debian/copyright
> files without sweating, nobody would complain.
I have three slightly devil's-advocate responses to that:
* If we had a good toolchain to compile and audit this stuff, people
and companies who want to know the copyright holders could just use
that to inspect the upstream source code and cut out the middle-man.
* Our copyright files are only correct inasmuch as upstream's copyright
attribution is correct. I would guess that a large majority of patch
submitters, even implementors of somewhat major features that are
certainly copyrightable, don't actually add a copyright notice to the
files they touched. I certainly don't do that 100% consistently for my
own contributions; I'm careful to preserve *other people's* copyright
notices and license grants if I incorporate someone else's code into a
project, but I think I can confidently say that not all upstreams
are even that conscientious.
* I will continue to complain as long as my "source" packages are
expected to contain 87kB monsters like
<https://sources.debian.net/src/adwaita-icon-theme/3.20-3/debian/copyright/>,
which is fairly clearly not anyone's preferred form for modification,
and if we're being honest probably not really anyone's preferred form for
consumption either. (That file is actually generated, by the slightly
less offensive 11kB
<https://sources.debian.net/src/adwaita-icon-theme/3.20-3/debian/copyright.pl/>,
because I really didn't want to insert the CC licenses by hand; but
Policy and ftp-master practice require the generated file to be part
of the source upload. See also <https://bugs.debian.org/768292>.)
Regards,
S
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