Bug#920575: copyright-without-copyright-notice assumes upstream has copyright notices

[Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>]

Package: lintian
Version: 2.5.124
Severity: normal

The check "copyright-without-copyright-notice" assumes that upstream has
copyright notices to include. Given that copyright notices are not
legally required (and copyright subsists in works without such notices),
some upstreams avoid including such notices. In such a work,
debian/copyright would have no such copyright notice to include.

To forestall an obvious objection, namely "what about a copyright
notice for the Debian packaging", the same thing applies to people
writing Debian packaging as well.

(This lintian issue currently leads me to have a build wrapper script
generating debian/copyright, rather than just having a static
debian/copyright file checked in.)

Thanks,
Josh Triplett