On Tue, 25 Aug 2015, Santiago Vila wrote:
On Sun, 23 Aug 2015, Thorsten Alteholz wrote:But policy says that there "should" be such a copyright file. Violating such a clause is at least an important bug.I guess you refer to policy when it says that we could match "must" with "serious" and "should" with "important".
yes
However, the BTS documentation says that important means "a bug which has a major effect on the usability of a package, without rendering it completely unusable to everyone". Not having a debian/copyright file in the source package does not affect usability of the package in *any* way.
If it is not possible to add the copyright and license information to the binary package, it might violate some licenses and such the package may not be distributed by Debian or may not be used on Debian systems.
As the normal workflow of packaging is to collect the copyright and license information in debian/copyright and copy that file into the binary package during build, a missing file might make the package unusable. Of course, not in a technical manner.
Anyway, in the light of source only uploads, how shall the copyright and license information of the binary packages be verified, if there is no debian/copyright? Either the maintainer or the ftpteam has to do the work. Given that the package output of about 1000 maintainers needs to be checked by just a few members of the ftpteam, the burden should be distributed on the larger group. And experience shows that there is a check needed to fulfill the DFSG.
Thorsten