On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 10:24:05AM +1000, Ben Finney wrote: > In light of recent discussion [0] about ‘debian/copyright’ and what a > Debian package should include in that file, I would like to see some > clean-up of the current (residual?) assertions of what needs to be > included. > Policy §12.5, “Copyright information”, appears to be the complete set of > direct normative statements of what's required: > 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. This is "(copyright) and (distribution license)", where "copyright" should be understood as "copyright statement". It sounds like you may have been reading this as "(copyright and distribution) license". It's an understandable mistake since the wording is ambiguous, but this interpretation is ruled out because "copyright license and distribution license" doesn't make sense as a pairing. > There are side references that seem to assert additional requirements: > 3.4. The description of a package > --------------------------------- > […] > Copyright statements and other administrivia should not be > included either (that is what the copyright file is for). > and: > > 3.9.1. Prompting in maintainer scripts > -------------------------------------- > […] > Copyright messages do not count as vitally important (they > belong in `/usr/share/doc/<package>/copyright')[…] > Both of these seem to imply that copyright notices need to be in > ‘debian/copyright’, but §12.5 doesn't say that at all. Am I right that > these assertions in §3.4 and §3.9.1 are false and should be removed? With the above clarification, these are entirely consistent. -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/ slangasek@ubuntu.com vorlon@debian.org
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