Dear Sean, Thank you again for your patience and extra help! On Sun, Jan 15, 2017 at 05:51:09PM -0700, Sean Whitton wrote: > > Ah! Yes, this is the spec that addresses my question to #3. That > > said, in the past some of my other work on d/copyright has been said > > to be "worse than useless" even though it adhered to the spec, and > > even though it seemed to reflect what I saw reading the packages > > COPYING file, in addition to spending a while reading VCS commits for > > stuff I wasn't sure about. This has led me to wonder about the tribal > > rules that are not in the spec... > > Could you give me an example of a rule like that? It'll take time to dig up examples from my backups, so I'll need to defer concrete examples until something like mid February. It might be stuff like my failure to identify a package that is following DEP-5 vs SPDX, but because of comments like "worst than useless" I figured there must have been some rule I didn't understand...because that's way too strong of a reaction for something that is a question of style. :-) At this point, however, I don't think further discussion fits into this thread, because it is too tangential to muse-el. By the way, is one space indentation for copyright definition blocks what should now be used (commit 5ba94789a7f35d5938d88226c6ea35fd98635a5b)? I noticed the packaging guide's example uses one space, but most of the copyright-format/1.0 packages I've looked at use four. Just a convention? > > Would you please check to see if my latest commit to d/copyright is > > ok? It's what makes the most sense to me. As far as I can tell, it > > might be problematic because it infers that Eric Marsden changed > > cgi.el in 2003. If it's problematic I'll revert it, then dch -r. > > No, it doesn't actually imply that Marsden changed that file in 2004 > (the spec does explain this!). Ah, from packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0 "Not all copyright notices may apply to every individual file, and years of publication for one copyright holder may be gathered together" [1]. So short form rules I misunderstood are: * Wildcards are hungry globs. * Lists of files are white-space, tab, or newline separated strings. * Years may be specified as either a comma-separated list of discrete years, or a year-to-year range. * Refer to individual files or VCS for specific dates when multiple files are grouped, because [1]. I also wonder how many contributors there must be to justify a "Primary copyright holder, and others" statement, and also if one needs to do VCS archaeology to find and list all of the potential one-off contributors. > Go ahead and `dch -r`! Done, finally! :-D Cheers, Nicholas
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