Bug#438492: Policies copyright rule doesn't fit empty transitional packages
Package: policy
Severity: normal
Policy says:
> 12.5 Copyright information
>
> Every package must be accompanied by a verbatim copy of its
> copyright and distribution license in the file
> /usr/share/doc/package/copyright. This file must neither be
> compressed nor be a symbolic link.
>
> In addition, the copyright file must say where the upstream sources
> (if any) were obtained. It should name the original authors of the
> package and the Debian maintainer(s) who were involved with its
> creation.
>
> A copy of the file which will be installed in
> /usr/share/doc/package/copyright should be in debian/copyright in
> the source package.
>
> /usr/share/doc/package may be a symbolic link to another directory
> in /usr/share/doc only if the two packages both come from the same
> source and the first package Depends on the second. These rules are
> important because copyrights must be extractable by mechanical
> means.
>
> Packages distributed under the UCB BSD license, the Artistic
> license, the GNU GPL, and the GNU LGPL, should refer to the
> corresponding files under /usr/share/common-licenses,[82] rather
> than quoting them in the copyright file.
>
> You should not use the copyright file as a general README file. If
> your package has such a file it should be installed in
> /usr/share/doc/package/README or README.Debian or some other
> appropriate place.
This does not work well with transitional packages that are completly
empty. The idea is that dpkg will automatically forget about the
transitional package after upgrade allowing for example to rename a
package without leaving a dummy package under the old name
installed. For this to work the transitional package may have not
files, not even /usr/share/doc/package/copyright.
I suggest policy 12.5 to be extended with the wolloing text (or
something better worded):
Only exception to this rule are empty transitional packages that
contain no files and no maintainer scripts.
-- System Information:
Debian Release: 4.0
APT prefers stable
APT policy: (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Kernel: Linux 2.6.22.2-mrvn
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=de_DE (charmap=ISO-8859-1)
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