On 29/08/11 17:48, Russ Allbery wrote: > Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> writes: > >> Allowing debian/copyright to rely on files _other_ than the common >> licenses in base-files would be a larger and different change, so >> off-topic for this bug. Unless done carefully, I don't think it's a >> good idea. > > It's important to remember that Debian has a basic legal requirement to > provide the licensing terms with the packages that we distribute, and > those packages are potentially independent of each other from a legal > perspective. Just because one package has a dependency on another doesn't > mean that someone is required to download both packages, and when we > distribute packages that do not include required legal texts, we're on > shaky ground. > > The project decided to say that our packages are intended for use on a > Debian system with the essential Debian packages installed and hence not > duplicate licenses that are in base-files, which I think is a bit of a > hand-wave, but which lets us avoid shipping 20,000 copies of the GPL. The > legal requirements are generally quite clear, and the ideal legal position > to be in is inclusion of relevant license texts in every package so that > the individual object that we distribute is legally complete. > OK, this is understandable. I suppose we can't get around the fact that each source package should have the full text of a license. However, this doesn't mean that we must include them in debian/copyright specifically - is this restriction really necessary for policy? (I know this is off-topic for the bug but it's a continuation of the discussion.) It would be less trouble if you could point to license files. Normally, those files exist with the upstream source already, and also not re-formatted, so you can verify their contents more easily. It would also support more powerful automation tools. For example, we can have a dh script dereference these pointers and install all the license texts into the package's /doc/. And maybe have a licenses-helper program which could detect dangling pointers, and fill the common ones in automatically, to save the maintainer having to find them if they weren't included with upstream. X -- GPG: 4096R/5FBBDBCE https://github.com/infinity0 https://bitbucket.org/infinity0 https://launchpad.net/~infinity0
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