Bug#678607: debian-policy: "original authors" in 12.5 is unclear
Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> writes:
> Charles Plessy wrote:
>> My personal opinion is that it is best to focus the Debian copyright file
>> on the goal of respecting licenses and the copyright law, and to leave
>> to the upstream documentation the difficult task of stating who is author
>> and who is not.
> Just like naming the location from which the upstream source code was
> downloaded is useful, giving contact information (at least a name,
> mailing list, or web forum) for the upstream maintainer is useful, no?
> At least that is the rule I've followed in following this requirement
> in policy.
The context in which this came up was GNU time. A couple of people were
primarily responsible for the development of the package, under the aegis
of the FSF (which is the copyright holder, as with most GNU software).
There has been no new upstream release since 1996 and those people are not
apparently involved in development any more. The contact point for the
software officially is the bug-gnu-utils@gnu.org mailing list, which is a
generic list for a variety of minor GNU packages.
I think it's very unclear what Policy expects one to do with that.
Should the packager do the research to figure out the people who worked on
the software and document them somewhere in copyright? In this case, it's
fairly easy, since it's a GNU package and there is therefore an AUTHORS
file, but does that information really belong in debian/copyright (as
opposed to just installing the AUTHORS file as supplemental
documentation)? Those authors aren't useful for contact points; they've
not worked on the software in many years.
Is FSF the author? That's what I'd normally list, and of course in that
case listing the copyright statement is sufficient, and that's the
organization for which the human authors volunteered, so to me it's the
author (in a collective sense). It's also the author in the sense that if
anyone picks up new upstream development, it's very likely to be someone
else under the aegis of the FSF.
Would one list bug-gnu-utils@gnu.org? That's the most useful contact
point (and we have a copyright-format field for that), but it's not in any
real sense the "author."
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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