Bug#678607: debian-policy: "original authors" in 12.5 is unclear
Package: debian-policy
Severity: normal
Policy 12.5 says:
In addition, the copyright file must say where the upstream sources
(if any) were obtained, and should name the original authors.
The last part is not at all clear. Prior to a recent conversation on
debian-mentors, I had always assumed that this meant the legal authors,
so for GNU software saying that it was maintained by the Free Software
Foundation satisfied what this was asking for. Similarly for UCAID for
the Shibboleth software. But discussion makes clear that other people
were interpreting this as a requirement to name the specific people
involved in development (something that is often documented in a
separate AUTHORS or THANKS or CREDITS file, and sometimes isn't
documented at all).
Similarly, "original" is ambiguous. I had always assumed that meant
"upstream," as in the current upstream maintainer, since it was paired
with the upstream location. Those are the "original" authors from the
perspective of Debian, as opposed to the authors of the Debian package.
But other people interpret this as saying that debian/copyright needs
to name the original upstream authors, as in the first people to start
doing development on this source base. I don't really see the point in
that unless we're going to list *all* the authors, given that it's often
the case that the people making the first commits have done only a small
amount of the total work on the package.
If we do decide that this means that we need to list the specific people
involved in upstream development, we should also add a new field to the
copyright-format standard for that, since there isn't one at present.
We should also say something about how much archeology we expect package
maintainers to do if upstream doesn't document this.
Note that a lot of FSF software currently packaged in the archive follows
my interpretation and would become buggy under a different interpretation.
See, for example, the copyright files for gawk, bash, coreutils (well,
it has a reference to a separate file), or bc. (Other maintainers have
had different interpretations; see the copyright file for gnutls for one
that includes all the upstream authorship information.)
-- System Information:
Debian Release: wheezy/sid
APT prefers testing
APT policy: (990, 'testing'), (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 3.1.0-1-686-pae (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
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