Bug#610083: Remove requirement to document upstream source location in debian/copyright ?
On Sat, Jan 15, 2011 at 06:17:03PM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org> writes:
> > Le Fri, Jan 14, 2011 at 12:21:02PM -0400, Joey Hess a écrit :
>
> >> Especially if the plan is to later remove policy's requirement that
> >> copyright specify the Source, which would presumably mean deprecating
> >> the field in DEP5. And there's a good agument that policy's current
> >> requirement is vestigial, having been supersceded by more specific
> >> information that is provided in a machine-usable format in the watch
> >> file and Homepage field. The only remaining use for Source in DEP5
> >> would then be things like "Source: usenet posting from 1983".
>
> > I support Joey's comment and propose to simply remove the requirement
> > from the Policy. I do not think that people will remove the information
> > from debian/copyright without having a Homepage field if they do not
> > have one, so I propose to keep thinks short and to not cross-reference
> > nor replace with incitations.
>
> I could have sworn we'd discussed this before.
>
> I'm opposed to this change as proposed because it means that we can have
> packages without any hint as to where the upstream source came from (since
> Homepage is not required).
>
> I think it might be okay to make the indication of the origin of the
> upstream source in debian/copyright optional *if* Homepage clearly
> provides the same information for that package. (Note: this will not be
> the case for all packages with a Homepage setting, since in some cases
> it's hard or impossible to figure out how to get the upstream source when
> starting from the URL in Homepage.)
We should keep in mind that originally, the location of upstream source was
most of the time some directory on some public ftp server. For example
libjpeg6b had statement
"This package was created by Mark Mickan <mmickan@debian.org> from sources
which can be found at ftp://ftp.uu.net/graphics/jpeg/jpegsrc.v6b.tar.gz";
which did not provide any information about the project.
Cheers,
--
Bill. <ballombe@debian.org>
Imagine a large red swirl here.
Reply to: