Bug#678607: debian-policy: "original authors" in 12.5 is unclear
On Sat, Jun 23, 2012 at 01:50:32AM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> 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.
I do not think it is such a big deal. GNU time come with a changelog file
which says:
Thu Jul 11 12:37:17 1996 David J MacKenzie <djm@catapult.va.pubnix.com>
* Version 1.7.
So the original author is David J MacKenzie.
bug-gnu-utils@gnu.org might be the new contact point, but since they did not make a single
release in all this time, I would not have too high expectation on their responsiveness.
(and I do not think policy should require updating the copyright file if the
upstream version did not change).
Cheers,
--
Bill. <ballombe@debian.org>
Imagine a large red swirl here.
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