Re: debian/copyright in source package
On Sun, 16 Aug 2015, Santiago Vila wrote:
2. Why would policy say "should" instead of "must", if we then do not
allow for exceptions? (packages generating copyright file at build time).
This is not my area, but why should there be an exception?
To allow for the file to be automatically generated at build time,
which in turn avoids useless duplication of license text in the source
package.
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.
Even in case of unzip, where upstream seems to be rather accurate,
Christoper Evans is not mentioned in the LICENSE file. But according to
the file headers, at least he has the copyright for macos/source/macbin3.*
(He is mentioned in COPYING.OLD so there might be just a copy/paste error)
So from my point of view, there is no alternative to debian/copyright in
the source package.
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? 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.
Thorsten
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