On Thursday, November 30, 2017 11:26:31 AM CST Simon McVittie wrote: > On Wed, 29 Nov 2017 at 23:46:00 -0600, Steve Robbins wrote: > > On Tuesday, November 28, 2017 9:00:10 AM CST Chris Lamb wrote: > > > Hi, > > > > > > Sorry for the rejection but "Copyright: See individual source files" > > > unfortunatley does not meet the high standards we strive for within > > > Debian. > > > > [For] a massive multi-author, multi-year work like Boost, there seems very > > little value in summarizing copyrights. Boost has nearly 55000 files in > > the source distribution. What could one possibly achieve by summarizing > > this? How would anyone even read and make sense of it? > > I've written about this before, for example in > <https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2016/08/msg00181.html>, and I'd be > very glad to see an "official" response from the ftp team. It would, indeed, be nice to get a rationale for summarizing a file-by-file list of copyrights. I re-read that 2016 thread just now and it seems to me that most of the discussion centres around summarizing the LICENSE(s) of the resulting work. I agree that knowing the license of a package is useful. Having 55000 copyright lines is not. Perhaps we should deprecate debian/copyright and just create debian/license instead! > For a large package, gathering the list of copyright holders from > the source into debian/copyright is clearly a lot of work. Is there a > rationale for why we do that work? Is it self-imposed (because there > is believed to be consensus within Debian that we want it), or is it > to comply with the requirements of that particular package's copyright > license, or is it to meet some other legal requirement? It's telling to me that there was *no* answer to your question in the 2016 thread. I have only been around Debian for 20 years. Maybe someone with a longer history can recall the reasoning behind the copyright file? -Steve
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