Re: doubts about debian/copyrights

To be honest, the copyright file always is the most time consuming part of packaging for Debian, at least for me. So that's not really unexpected, dh handles most other issues as long as you don't have to rewrite the upstream build system. (Making a Debian package can be pretty quick. Making a package to submit to the Debian project takes a lot longer)

I figure it's worth it as it makes the packages in Debian higher quality and better understood, though I do wish that more projects did things like https://reuse.software (standard for having copyright and license data in every file, etc) and that Debian tooling handled this format or spdx data better. (I've written some quick utilities to help with this but they aren't very polished).

Don't get discouraged! Especially since there is an upstream in this case who should be fairly easy to find and contact, it's a project and not just one person with an outdated email address...

Ryan

On Sun, Oct 23, 2022, 8:39 AM Fabio Fantoni <fantonifabio@tiscali.it> wrote:

Il 23/10/2022 04:04, Paul Wise ha scritto:
> On Sat, 2022-10-22 at 15:59 +0200, Fabio Fantoni wrote:
>
>> Which would be the best tool(s) to get a good starting debian/copyright
>> and decrease the time it takes to complete and fix it?
> Allegedly scancode is the best option for that, but it isn't in Debian.
> I think decopy/licensecheck are the best ones already in Debian.
>
> https://wiki.debian.org/CopyrightReviewTools
> https://github.com/nexB/scancode-toolkit/
>
> Personally I afterwards manually review each file and check all of the
> details, since the Debian archive admins will be doing that anyway.
> I find that a keyboard-driven file manager like mc works for this.

Thanks for reply, some manual checks can be ok, but when you start
having difficulties and it takes more time for debian/copyright alone
than all the rest of the packaging I think it is unpleasant and
unproductive.

then when the files are thousands or more manually checking each one
would be impossible as time

>
>> decopy spotted one file (usr/share/icons/Mint-X/apps/96/miro.svg) with
>> license "CC-BY", I tried a search for found the specific license used
>> but I not found, in mint-theme instead for example about a license doubt
>> I went to look for the origin and I found it and solved it
>> (https://salsa.debian.org/cinnamon-team/mint-themes/-/commit/dcf71951df39f326ea9057d39095f7e94926bf19),
>> regarding this file, however, the site mentioned inside no longer exists
>> and therefore I have not found a certain answer.
> All the sites mentioned in that commit work for me:
>
> https://github.com/shimmerproject/Greybird
> https://shimmerproject.org/

the commit linked about mint-theme was a search I did successfull (as
example) intead about mint-x-icons was not

>
>> there are also some other files with "creative common" found inside it
>> with a grep but that was not spotted by decopy and also in these there
>> aren't details on the exact license
> Might be worth filing bugs on decopy about these missing detections.

done, seems that decopy spotted only the one file with:



and not:

xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#"

that with a grep seems in 1872 files

>
> As Andrew says, best ask upstream about any unclear licenses.
>
done