Re: Bug#451647: debian/copyright and actual copyrights

[Ron <ron@debian.org>]

On Sun, Nov 18, 2007 at 09:28:28AM +0100, Pierre Habouzit wrote:
>   OTOH this debian/copyright is clearly deficient in many ways, but stop
> accusing him of bad faith, you're just out of your mind.

Thanks Pierre, you've just saved us all from my response to jeff's
wild slander from the hip.

There are two issues here, the important one being -policy compliance,
the other stylistic.  Since the bug was raised to red-alert-panic severity
without pointing to a single clear policy violation, I'll ask again for
the sake of our new audience, before I summarily close it by way of reply:

Can someone show me any single MUST in policy that is violated by this
debian/copyright file?  Bonus points if you can get them all first time.

Because by my reading, there apparently aren't any.

I don't extrapolate from that to say this is a masterpiece of best
practice, because its actually clearly one of the most appalling
copyright files I've ever seen.  Kid's don't clone this at home.
I mean it.  This is the kind of boilerplate abuse your parents and
friends warned you about.  (even if it is better than some of the
ones Ganneff has to sort through -- that's nothing to brag about)

I can make my excuses for that separately[1], but our law here is
-policy, and if I, the boilerplate maker, ftp-admin, and any number
of other developers have not spotted a violation of it in all the
many years this has looked the way it does -- then we have a quite
different serious bug on our hands we should know more about.

I don't think that is the case though, I do agree this file needs
the same sort of treatment the Smith inquisition recently gave the
rest of the package text, and that will be done, but its probably
not a job for -legal, and clearly not 'serious' in the BTS sense.

Cheers,
Ron


[1] - Ok then, you asked for it:

 This package started out (intended) as an uncertain mash-up of
 various tablet related things from various sources.  Right now
 it really is mostly just the linuxwacom driver, and I'm mostly
 hacking on it vicariously at present since the kernel driver is
 sound, and other folks are the XOrg experts where the trouble is.
 The copyright file apparently hasn't been polished since then
 and just contains the minimum required to cover the things that
 were going in there (and some fairly stupid typos).  It makes
 sense to buff it up a bit now that things have a fairly stable
 form established.  All the original attributions and licences
 are kept with the relevant source, this is just the cover page
 in the binary, and since it clearly has almost no additional
 information than the minimum required of it, I'd expect any
 wise user would not try to infer any such things from that
 nothingness and quickly look elsewhere for them instead.