Re: Built-Using usage question

[Lukas Schwaighofer <lukas@schwaighofer.name>]

Hi,

On Sat, 30 Dec 2017 19:42:01 -0800
Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> wrote:

> I don't think you need to change anything about Built-Using.  That
> seems like exactly the sort of reason anticipated by DFSG
> compliance.  The clarification in Policy is because the previous
> wording would have required literally every program in the archive
> written in C to declare Built-Using against the version of GCC used
> to build them because of the nature of libgcc, and at the request of
> the release team to not use Built-Using for library update purposes.

Thanks for clarifying, I'll leave that as is then.

> > While thinking about the above problem I noticed something else
> > which brings me to my second question:  Parts of gnu-efi are
> > covered by the BSD-3-clause license.  In order to satisfy the
> > second clause (“Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the
> > above copyright notice […]”) do I need to somehow include the
> > debian/copyright file from gnu-efi in the syslinux-efi binary
> > package?  
> 
> Yes, or at least the portions relevant to the code that's being
> statically linked.  The resulting binary is a derivative work of the
> syslinux-efi package, so you need to follow its license.

Ok, I expected as much.  Any suggestions on where to put that?
/usr/share/doc/syslinux-efi/copyright seems like the obvious place (and
is mandated by policy §12.5) but if I understand the machine readable
format correctly, it doesn't support my use-case at all (since there are
no files in the source package that can be matched).


Also this could also be a more systematic problem.  At least when
looking quickly at some of the other packages which build-depend on
gnu-efi, I couldn't see them reproducing the copyright notice in the
binary package either (I did not check thoroughly though).

Do you think it's possible to apply some sort of automated solution to
the problem?  I could think of a "built-using" support in debhelper
that will not only add the built-using header but also copy the
(complete) copyright file from the included package into the
including binary package somewhere in /usr/share/doc/$package . While
it will waste some space (and duplicate files), it will also make sure
that we correctly follow any copyright changes without requiring the
package maintainers to manually track them.

Thanks
Lukas