Re: debian/copyright in source package
[ Dropping CC for Simon and Russ because I know for sure they are in
-policy ].
On Sun, Aug 16, 2015 at 06:23:52PM +0200, Thorsten Alteholz wrote:
> But what shall be the source for this generation?
I was basically doing "cat debian/copyright.in LICENSE"
Not anything AI-style, and not trying to fix the original LICENSE.
In this particular case, LICENSE is now MIT-style and not a big file
anymore, as it used to be, so there is not a great benefit in the file
being generated automatically. It will be easy to stop doing that, and
that's what I will probably do.
The case explained by Simon is more elaborated and a *lot* more
interesting.
> >I know that we usually treat packages as "whole works", but in theory
> >a package might well be an aggregation of different programs having
> >different copyright and licenses, in which case it would be
> >theoretically possible to have a different copyright file for each of
> >them.
>
> Yes, but wouldn't this be valid only for binary packages?
> [...]
In the hypothetical case I imagine, the copyright files for the binary
packages would be different, and then you can't make the one in the
source to be a copy of *any* of them, as policy requires.
On Sun, Aug 16, 2015 at 10:41:16AM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> 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.
Yes, I think this practical reason (the ability to extract
automatically copyright files from source packages) is the main reason
why debian/copyright is required.
So we could just add it to policy as a rationale.
Thanks.
Reply to: