Bug#737559: copyright-format: author != copyright, add an author field?
Daniel Pocock <daniel@pocock.com.au> writes:
> There are cases where I would have used it and I believe that
> recognising people's work (even if they have assigned their rights) is
> an important way of showing our thanks and acknowledgment to those who
> develop free software, and having a dedicated field makes them stand out
> just that little bit more.
I'm all in favor of recognizing people's work.
I'm dubious that the *copyright* file is the right place to do that, for
precisely the reason that you point out about why the Copyright field is
the wrong place to do that.
The copyright file in our packages is primarily a legal artifact, with
some other stuff mixed in. It's not a model of purity of purpose at the
moment (see "other stuff mixed in"), but I'm not sure that evolving it
further in the direction of being a catch-all metadata file about the
upstream code is a good idea.
In other words, I think the author information might fit better into
DEP-12 than in copyright-format.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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