Re: debian/copyright in source package
Thorsten Alteholz <alteholz@debian.org> writes:
> But what shall be the source for this generation?
> The copyright information that are created by upstream are most of the
> time not really up to date.
The maintainer can add overrides or patch the upstream files to make them
more accurate in this case, no?
> Yes, but wouldn't this be valid only for binary packages? The source
> package still remains just a big bunch of files, which all might have
> different license information. If you build several binary packages, the
> license information of each of them might be different. But this should
> have no influence on the contents of the license information in the
> source package.
Sure, but the source package is, by definition, just stuff that the Debian
maintainer added plus the work as distributed upstream. Presumably
upstream is happy with the license declarations and included license files
in their own distribution. If those also contain enough information for a
Debian user to find the license, it's not clear to me that there's a
problem.
Basically, I think this reduces to a question of whether we guarantee the
existence of a debian/copyright file summarizing all copyright information
in a *source* package, or if the copyright file requirement is aimed
primary at binary packages.
I think this has come up before, and my recollection of where we ended up
in the past is that there probably isn't any *legal* reason to require
debian/copyright in source packages. However, there's a substantial
*practical* reason, namely that the existing ftpmaster tooling depends on
the existence of a source debian/copyright file for the way that they do
license reviews, and that some tooling and process changes would be
required before we can relax this requirement.
I've been pretty distracted away from Debian work for the past year; maybe
that work has since been done, or I'm misrecalling the previous
discussion?
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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