Bug#649530: [copyright-format] clearer definitions and more consistent License: stanza specification

[Ximin Luo <infinity0@gmx.com>]

Apologies for the late reply; somehow this email ended up in my spam folder.

On 25/12/12 18:28, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Ximin Luo <infinity0@gmx.com> writes:
> 
>> This feels very much like delay tactics, and makes me feel very
>> frustrated as someone who is trying to contribute to Debian.
> 
> You should consider the possibility that no one is trying to delay
> anything, but rather that we simply aren't convinced by the changes that
> you're proposing.
> 

Well, more criticism would be appreciated rather than silence. The counter-arguments made so far haven't been very strong; I can't read people's minds see criticism beyond this. There is no "motivation" document for this spec either so it's not like I can infer this too.

> Having a formal grammar for license names that recognizes the version
> component was something that was done in an earlier draft of this document
> and then abandoned due to the complexity.  Personally, having written
> files to both the earlier and current grammar, I really don't miss it.  It
> makes the specification more formally robust, but at a cost to both
> complexity and understanding when just casually applying the
> specification.
> 
> I think most people are going to just look up their specific license in
> the list of licenses that have pre-assigned keywords, use one if there is
> one there, and make one up otherwise.  I don't think having the grammar be
> more formal about syntax and versioning is that helpful to that process.
> 

My proposal does not make anything "more formal". The two main changes are {moving one concept into another section} and {restricting the definition for a section}.

>> This is because people misunderstand what a License is; my changes will
>> help communicate and correct this mistake.
> 
>> Different BSD-3-Clause licenses have the *same terms*; that is what
>> makes them BSD-3-Clause. However, as commonly written, people add
>> author- and software-specific information to their statement of the
>> license. We cannot do this in debian/copyright because that would be
>> logically inconsistent, since:
> 
>> If a package contains files under different BSD-3-Clause licenses, each
>> with different owners, but the terms are the same, (according to my
>> changes) the owners would be stripped out and put in the relevant Files:
>> paragraphs, and the common terms would be put in *one* stand-alone
>> License: paragraph. Currently, it is impossible to merge these; you
>> would have to give the licenses each different names.
> 
> You've expressed this opinion before, and I understand what you're saying
> and why you believe this.  I just don't agree that this is a good change.
> The serious problem with what you propose is that the exact text of the
> upstream license is no longer reproduced in debian/copyright.  I consider
> that the baseline requirement for that file, and therefore consider that
> to be a fatal problem.
> 
> Compared to losing the verbatim text, I think having multiple license
> blocks for the variations of the license is a minor problem.
> 

OK, this is a new point that hasn't been made before in this thread, thank you for communicating it.

Why is it essential for the verbatim text to be in debian/copyright, when the source package should already contain this? We could alternatively add a Location: field to point to the verbatim license in /usr/share/doc or the base directory of the source package, rather than duplicating information?

> What I would find useful is some way to standardize the short names of the
> variations of those licenses so that one can use distinguished short names
> for the different variations within a file but still make it clear to
> automated parsers that they're following the base license template.  That
> gains some of the benefit of your proposal in terms of making the file
> clearer and allowing use of the standard license short names, without
> losing the verbatim text of the license.
> 

I'm not sure I understand this. How is this different from the current case where you can specify multiple License fields (in different Files paragraphs) with the same short name (e.g. BSD-3-Clause) but different full text (e.g. containing copyright year, authors)?