Bug#737559: copyright-format: author != copyright, add an author field?

[Daniel Pocock <daniel@pocock.com.au>]

On 03/02/14 20:36, Jonathan Nieder wrote:
> Daniel Pocock wrote:
> 
>> Just to clarify, I do not believe that maintaining this field should be
>> obligatory
>>
>> It should be an optional field
>>
>> Defining it formally in the standard and having some examples will help
>> emphasize the difference between what people should put in the Copyright
>> field and what should not be there.
>>
>> If a maintainer feels that some author is particularly noteworthy or
>> deserving, then they can put that author's name in the field even if the
>> author has no entitlement to appear in the copyright field.
> 
> Yes, I understood that.  Which is why I wrote
> 
>> On 03/02/14 20:17, Jonathan Nieder wrote:
> 
>>> So, I think this is a reasonable idea, and if more than two or so
>>> packages start using the field then it's probably worth documenting in
>>> policy to allow tools to start to consume it if they like.
> 
> Do you think this should be documented before people try it out and
> figure out what kind of values make sense for the field?
> 
> I would be less excited about that, but I'm not opposed to it.  My
> thoughts would then be
> 
>  - If possible, please find someone else to weigh in on how this is
>    useful to them (e.g., do they have an example copyright file which
>    it makes cleaner?).
> 
>  - I suspect 'Authors' is not a good name for this field.  The word
>    is too tightly tied to copyright, 'rights of the author', legal
>    authorship, and so on.  Something like 'Contributors' should be
>    fine, though.

The actual word that is chosen is not so important for me

>  - Have you been using this field in your packages?  If not, is policy
>    getting in the way of that?  (That would be a more serious bug and
>    worth addressing first as a stopgap.)

I've only come across one package which included public-domain material
so far.  In this case, I put a note about the author in the comments.

It is not a blocking issue for me.

One risk of not having this extra field is that we could accumulate
excessive things in the Copyright field.  E.g. some packagers may be
including the names of contributors as if they are copyright holders
because they are afraid their package will be queried (and subsequently
delayed) by the FTP masters if they left something out by mistake.