On Sun, 16 Aug 2015, 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.
Hmm, lots of licenses require their text distributed together with the sources. If you look at R packages from cran, they are usually characterized by a complete absence of those texts. So in such cases (cran is only an example) the debian/copyright in source packages helps to play the game.
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?
No, there are still no other tools to process NEW. The discussion started because I was just looking a bit closer at the packages in the archive.
Thorsten