Rejected: Bug#367650: allow pointers to info docs for licenses like GFDL that apply to them
This proposal asks to relax the requirements for debian/copyright to
permit pointers to info docs that contain the relevant license.
There are a few problems with this, some of which were spelled out in the
resulting thread. It prevents easily extracting all the relevant
copyright files from a set of packages and it weakens the current
guarantees that the copyright file is where all the relevant information
is. Also, on the practical front, the GFDL is now in common-licenses, and
that's the most common case where a license would be in an info document,
so the problem is now mostly theoretical.
For those reasons, I'm rejecting this proposal. It was not widely
discussed at the time it was proposed (2003), so this is a soft rejection,
meaning that if someone feels strongly about this proposal and wants to
step forward to champion it again, I'd be willing to reopen the bug.
However, I expect it would encounter a fair bit of opposition unless
there's a compelling practical case for changing the current rules.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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