Packages Within Packages (How to copyright?)

[Jonathan Yu <jonathan.i.yu@gmail.com>]

Hi:

The other day I was packaging Module::CPANTS::Analyse, a Perl module.
As part of its tests, it includes a bunch of other distributions in
gzipped tarball format. However, as these included tarballs are
actually those of other distributions, their copyright is different.
Sure, that's fine.

So I have a bunch of copyright statements for each .tar.gz file.

My question becomes: what happens when a file *inside* the tar.gz has
a different copyright than the rest of the package?

For example, in the Perl world, many distributions include ppport.h
(Perl/Pollution/Portability -- it's to provide backward compatibility
for the XS macros). However, as it is a file generated by another
distribution (Devel::PPPort), its copyright is different than the rest
of the distribution. However, Files: doesn't have sufficient
granularity to handle this, since it's a file within a gzipped
tarball.

(I should note that I think the point is to leave it as a tarball and
not simply extract it, because the Module::CPANTS::Analyse program
needs to test its ability to decompress the archive and peek inside).

Cheers,

Jonathan