[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: Is there a list contains all debian packages and it's license ?



On Sat, 23 Sep 2017 at 10:25:33 +0200, tomas@tuxteam.de wrote:
> Not a readymade solution, but perhaps a lead to follow: package copyright
> info is supposed to be in a file debian/copyright within the package source
> archive[1]. I don't know at the moment whether this info percolates to
> the package binary when building.

It does, and Debian Policy says it must. That information ends up in
/usr/share/doc/${binary_package}/copyright where ${binary_package} is the
binary package. For instance, the dbus source package produces binary
packages that include dbus, dbus-x11 and libdbus-1-3, so its
debian/copyright gets copied to /usr/share/doc/dbus/copyright,
/usr/share/doc/dbus-x11/copyright and /usr/share/doc/libdbus-1-3/copyright,
among others.

In rare cases the binary package copyright file is not identical to the
source copyright: if a package foo has a GPL part packaged as foo-utils
and a LGPL part packaged as libfoo0, it would be valid to list both GPL
and LGPL in debian/copyright, only GPL in /u/s/d/foo-utils/copyright
and only LGPL in /u/s/d/libfoo0/copyright. However, in practice
maintainers don't make use of this, because it creates extra work for
little or no benefit, and carries a risk of accidentally providing
incomplete or untrue copyright/licensing information.

    S


Reply to: