Bug#431109: [PROPOSAL] Disambiguate of Section 12.5

[Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org>]

By January 2012, there are still more than 7,000 binary packages whose
copyright file refers to a versionless symlink, according to the Lintian page
http://lintian.debian.org/tags/copyright-refers-to-symlink-license.html

Le Mon, Dec 31, 2007 at 11:20:40AM -0800, Russ Allbery a écrit :
> 
> For those listening on, to spare you the trouble of going to look, here's
> the current Policy text:
> 
>      Packages distributed under the UCB BSD license, the Artistic license,
>      the GNU GPL (version 2 or 3), the GNU LGPL (versions 2, 2.1, or 3),
>      and the GNU FDL (version 1.2) should refer to the corresponding files
>      under `/usr/share/common-licenses',[1] rather than quoting them in the
>      copyright file.
> 
> If you refer to the corresponding file through a symlink, this is still
> satisfied.
… 
> I personally don't believe the unversioned links should ever be used, but
> that's a separate matter.  The practice is intentionally not mentioned
> because I don't believe it should be recommended, but maintainers who want
> to use them can work it out for themselves.

Short review four years after.

A new tag was added to Lintian in 2009, copyright-refers-to-symlink-license
(pedantic).  However, despite this there are still thousands of packages whose
copyright file refers to a versionless symlink in 2012.

(The goal of this email is to add a summary to the bug report, where the year
is mentionned so that one does not waste time looking again in the short term.)

Cheers,

-- 
Charles Plessy
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan