Re: Bug#677013: RFS: time
Bart Martens <bartm@debian.org> writes:
> The previous package maintainers are also copyright holders of debian/*
> so debian/copyright needs an update for that.
While a package sponsor can of course ask for whatever they'd like before
being willing to sponsor a package, I do think it's worth noting that the
majority of packages in Debian do not record the copyright statements for
all contributors to the debian/* packaging, nor is this something that
we're enforcing on an archive-wide basis. It's a nice thing to do, but
I'm not sure how important it really is given that all those contributions
are already documented in debian/changelog.
> The file debian/copyright "should name the original authors", and David
> Keppel is such an author.
For the purposes of satisfying this portion of Policy, I think that
treating "authors" as meaning the same thing as "copyright holders" is
quite reasonable. For GNU software, that means the Free Software
Foundation, as that's what's listed in all the copyright statements.
I think asking people to document more authorship than upstream provides
in upstream's copyright statements is asking for quite a lot, and also is
a standard that we are not following in most of the rest of the archive.
I certainly don't bother to do that with my packages; documenting
upstream's copyright notices seems sufficient to me. If upstream doesn't
consider it important enough to record, I don't consider it a mandatory
part of being a Debian package maintainer to go do that historical
research myself, assuming that there are no legal issues raised by the
omission.
If upstream provides a separate CREDITS or THANKS file supplementing their
legal notices, I generally install that as a documentation file like any
other (but don't bother to invent copyright notices for all the people
listed there to add to debian/coypright).
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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