Bug#487201: MPL in common-licenses and convenience of packaging mozilla extensions
Ximin Luo <infinity0@gmx.com> writes:
> OK, thanks for clarifying. I take it then that "should" implies "not
> necessary" in this policy quote:
> "A copy of the file which will be installed in
> /usr/share/doc/package/copyright should be in debian/copyright in the
> source package. "
"should" is documented at the beginning of Policy:
In the normative part of this manual, the words _must_, _should_ and
_may_, and the adjectives _required_, _recommended_ and _optional_,
are used to distinguish the significance of the various guidelines in
this policy document. Packages that do not conform to the guidelines
denoted by _must_ (or _required_) will generally not be considered
acceptable for the Debian distribution. Non-conformance with
guidelines denoted by _should_ (or _recommended_) will generally be
considered a bug, but will not necessarily render a package
unsuitable for distribution. Guidelines denoted by _may_ (or
_optional_) are truly optional and adherence is left to the
maintainer's discretion.
These classifications are roughly equivalent to the bug severities
_serious_ (for _must_ or _required_ directive violations), _minor_,
_normal_ or _important_ (for _should_ or _recommended_ directive
violations) and _wishlist_ (for _optional_ items).
There are some circumstances involving packages with complex licensing
where some maintainers like to maintain separate copyright files for each
of the generated binary packages that contain only the information
relevant to that package, and in those cases, the copyright file installed
in binary packages may not be the same as debian/copyright.
In general, "should" means "this is what you do unless you know exactly
what you're doing and what the implications of making another choice are."
> Right. Actually by "pointing" I meant more specifically "to another file
> distributed along with the package", in the context of DEP-5 License:
> blocks.
I'm really not sure I see much utility in doing that, honestly. I know
that some people, yourself apparently included, see that as a huge win,
but to me the process of copying the license into debian/copyright is
trivial, as is putting it in DEP-5 format if one chooses to use that
format, and I don't really get why there's so much resistance to just
doing that. And it makes it much easier for, for example, ftp-master to
review the package and be sure all the licenses are where they should be.
> If the pointing mechanism was well-defined, then lint could detect any
> "bugs". For example, if we edit DEP-5 such: { a License: block can
> either have at least 1 paragraph of long-text, or it must include a
> Location: line that points to an existing file in the same directory },
> then it's trivial to detect missing files.
See, now you've (to my mind) introduced considerably more complexity than
just putting a copy of the license into debian/copyright like we're doing
now.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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