Re: Built-Using usage question
Lukas Schwaighofer <lukas@schwaighofer.name> writes:
> 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).
Yeah, I don't think the machine-readable format really anticipated this.
This might be a good use case for just not using that format for this
package. But also feel free to open a bug against debian-policy to come
up with some better approach for representing this sort of information.
(This somewhat ties into the long-standing argument over whether
debian/copyright should document the copyright and license of the
artifacts in the binary package, or the files in the source package.)
One interesting alternative approach (although this is not the way this
usually works, so you'll be swimming upstream against the tools) is to
only document the contents of your package in debian/copyright, but
install a separate copyright file into the built binary package that
documents the copyright and license of the artifacts in that package
(including the information for syslinux-efi).
> 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).
My guess is that most people don't think of it, and it's also very
unlikely that anyone is going to sue over it or anything. But to be fully
in compliance with the license, I do think the resulting binary package
needs a copy of that license.
> 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.
Yes, this does seem like a good idea to me.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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