Re: Question about debian/copyright
On Wed, Apr 19, 2006 at 05:07:37PM +0200, Frank K?ster wrote:
> 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.
And the ability to do so is made easy by dh_installdocs:
If dh_installdocs is acting on multiple packages, debian/copyright files will
be installed into all packages. However, if you need to have sepa- rate
copyright files for different binary packages, you can use files named
debian/package.copyright.
Justin
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