Re: length of Debian copyright files
On 4/11/20 4:47 PM, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> My point is that the machine-readable format is being "abused" to
> deep-check the copyright status of all the files, and to reject
> stuff/file bugs/... based on that.
Probably, but you're not forced into doing it. For example, if you find
that some files have different copyright holders with the same license,
it's fine to just merge both in a single paragraph, if you mention both
copyright holders. I believe you could generalize this by also merging
multiple license and copyright holders in a single paragraph.
> Yes, a machine-readable copyright format is useful for our users. It
> is, however, not useful if it is being used to inspect packages and kick
> maintainers for not doing useless busywork. It is my belief that this is
> actually happening, and therefore I don't want to do the
> machine-readable copyright format.
>
> People who care enough about the license of a piece of software that
> they *do* need to know *all* these details can do the damn busywork
> themselves; I will not.
With what I wrote above, you don't need to go into details, but still
use a format which can be parsed by a machine.
Something like this:
Files: *
Copyright: (c) YEAR copyright holder 1
(c) YEAR copyright holder 2
Comments: Parts of this software are released with license-1 and others
with license-2. See individual files for details.
License: license-1-or-license-2
License-1
.
foo
.
license-2
.
bar
As much as I know, writing the above is still Debian compliant, you
don't go into each file details, and everyone is happy.
If the above is wrong, please someone (from the FTP team?!?), explain me
(and everyone else) why it's legally wrong.
Cheers,
Thomas Goirand (zigo)
P.S: I personally don't do the above, and make the extra effort of
copyright holding and license attribution to each individual files.
Reply to: