在 2017年12月6日星期三 CST 下午11:12:19，Steve Robbins 写道： > 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 My personal thoughts: Debian/copyright file can help maintainers figure out the license status of *each* files to check DFSG status more easily, and that's all. The copyright holder does not really matter: listing contributors really should be the job of *upstream*. We must admit that d/copyright is useful: writing this file can help figure out the source and license to each file and discover non-dfsg files / vendored libraries included secretly by upstream (which happens from time to time). That should be helpful to ftp master's task of processing NEW queue and examining each file's license. Howerver, what we, the distribution maintainers, really care is that these files do not conflict with our guideline aka DFSG. In this situation it is the license that matters, not copyright holders. For large software like linux kernel or libboost, we don't really need to take hours trying to make a comprehensive author list in d/copyright file. Something like "2010-2017 (C) The Boost Maintainers" should be acceptable. Of course if the file is under a different license (different from th license of whole project) or some authors had their names written inside source code *explicitly*(e.g., in the comment), it must be listed out in a separate paragraph of d/copyright. Regards, Boyuan Yang
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