Bug#286842: lintian: Avoid false positives
Felipe Sateler <fsateler@gmail.com> writes:
> Package: lintian
> Followup-For: Bug #286842
>
> Is this working correctly? Take this from the csound package I'm
> preparing (not in the archive yet):
>
> Copyright notices:
>
> Csound is copyright (c)
> 1986-1992 by the Massachussetts Institute of Technology
> 1991-2008 by Barry Vercoe, John ffitch and others.
>
> CsoundAC (formerly CsoundVST) is copyright (c) 2001-2008 by Michael Gogins.
>
> The csound Manual is copyright (c):
> 2003 by Kevin Conder
> 2004-2005 by Michael Gogins
>
> This is causing lintian to warn about copyright-without-copyright-notice
It doesn't like the interposed (and meaningless) (c) in the case where the
copyright is split across multiple lines. I'll try to make it better
about recognizing this, but the second example in particular gets more and
more annoying to detect as more punctuation and newlines are added. It's
much easier if the debian/copyright file just has the official legal
copyright notices on lines by themselves. The more work that goes into
moving things around, adding punctuation and newlines, and whatnot, the
harder it is to detect.
In other words, better would be:
Copyright 2003 by Kevin Conder
Copyright 2004-2005 by Michael Gogins
However, in general you want to copy the upstream notices verbatim, and I
know that these two desires are in tension and upstreams use notices like
you have above. The cases above should be possible to adapt for.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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