Re: Sponsorship requirements and copyright files
On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 11:47:37AM +0100, Rene Engelhard wrote:
> Giacomo A. Catenazzi wrote:
> > Joerg Jaspert wrote:
> >>>>> The real problem here is that FTP masters require the list of copyright
> >>>>> holders to be up-to-date each time the package goes through NEW.
> >>>>> Whatever justification exists for this requirement, I???m starting to find
> >>>>> it unacceptable. If a package has to go through NEW, it takes about
> >>>>> twice as much time to update this list than to do the actual packaging
> >>>>> work.
> >>>>> Why is this list needed?
> >>>> Often the license requires it. For instance the BSD license says,
> >>>> "Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright".
> >
> > *binary*
>
> But we do distribute binaries in the debs - and debian/copyright is
> not only for the source but also ends up in the deb.
Actually, Policy does not make mandatory for the .deb file to contain
a copyright file at all:
`/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.[2]
(I am not a fan of this particular paragraph of Policy, but that is
irrelevant, and there is a number of packages taking advantage of that)
Policy also allows package to refer to /usr/share/common-licenses (part of
base-files) for actual license texts (for a limited set of license).
So we already allow packages to reference other packages for license
informations. Binary package referencing its source package for detailed
license information is not quite a stretch.
Cheers,
--
Bill. <ballombe@debian.org>
Imagine a large red swirl here.
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