Re: Any script to populate debian/copyright file ?
Ben Finney <ben+debian@benfinney.id.au> writes:
> Aliaksei Sheshka <sheshkaoss@gmail.com> writes:
>> 2) Which license do have auto generated files, like 'configure',
>> 'Makefile', *am', etc ?
> If there is no human creativity in the generation of the files, then my
> understanding of international copyright law is that such files are not
> subject to copyright and hence they are merely an automatic non-creative
> transformation from the source form of the work; they would be under
> whatever license the source document is under.
For good or ill, there is a long tradition in Debian of not requiring
people to document the licenses of files that are only internal to the
build system, *provided that* (a) those licenses are free, (b) those
licenses are compatible with the rest of the source, and (c) those files
are not part of any binary package.
I'm not personally all that fond of that loophole and document all the
licenses for the build system as well, but be aware that doing this
thoroughly is quite a bit more difficult than it appears. (For example,
several of those files have multiple license statements and multiple
copyright holders scattered throughout the file, so just looking at the
top of each file isn't sufficient.) I have a rather extensive (and highly
ideosyncratic) script that I use that generates DEP-5 license files for my
packages for which I'm also upstream, which is far, far stricter than
licensecheck and the CDBS tools. For packages for which I'm not upstream,
in my newer packages, I try to produce an approximation by hand; for many
of my older packages, I've not bothered.
Documenting the build system licenses, particularly in the common case of
Autoconf, Automake, and Libtool where all those licenses are known to be
free, is not something that ftpmaster has ever previously required.
Unfortunately, there is not good documentation of exactly what's required
in copyright files. There are a lot of open bugs against Policy about
this.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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