Re: Question about debian/copyright
Miriam Ruiz <little_miry@yahoo.es> wrote:
> More concisely, is debian/copyright supposed to include the copyright and
> license of the contents of the binary package in which it is contained, or the
> source package from which it is generated? Take into account that the source
> package already contains the copyright notices related to the source
> distribution, right as upstream have included them.
But the upstream information is not always easy to find. It's easy for
a simple package with one single license, but in that case you don't
need to distinguish between the source package's and the binary
packages' copyright files.
In my opinion, if the copyright/licensing situation is complicated
enough that you consider putting only relevant parts into binary
packages' copyright files, there should also be a debian/copyright file
(or some of them, with easy to find names) in the source package that
describes what you, the Debian maintainer, know about upstream's
licensing and copyright information.
If this is the case, I think it's a matter of judgement what to do with
the binary packages. Note that it's also a lot of work to keep split
copyright files up to date - you might want to rearrange the packaging
some day.
If a software comes with some data included that might be useful for
others (like fonts) and is installed as a separate binary package (like
foo-xfonts), then it might really make sense to include in
/usr/share/doc/foo-xfonts/copyright only the information about these
data. And I don't see how this is against policy.
Regards, Frank
--
Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX)
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