On Tuesday, December 12, 2017 09:29:27 PM Markus Koschany wrote: > Hi, > > thanks for reporting. I also intended to make such a proposal and I had > briefly mentioned it in bug #883966. [1] > > The reason why the short form is allowed is because of Debian Policy 12.5 > > "Packages distributed under the Apache license (version 2.0), the > Artistic license, the GNU GPL (versions 1, 2, or 3), the GNU LGPL > (versions 2, 2.1, or 3), the GNU FDL (versions 1.2 or 1.3), and the > Mozilla Public License (version 1.1 or 2.0) should refer to the > corresponding files under /usr/share/common-licenses, [9] rather than > quoting them in the copyright file." > > I agree that using boiler plate like this: > | License: GPL-2+ > | On Debian systems the full text of the GPL-2 can be found in > | /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-2 > > is still redundant. > > I suggest to change Debian Policy 12.5 and copyright format 1.0 in such > a way that the following syntax is allowed: > > License: [GPL-2+] > > This would imply the license is identical to the one we ship under > /usr/share/common-licenses/. Services like sources.debian.org could > easily parse this field and automatically link to the full license-text. > > I don't have a fixation about using brackets. We could also use > something else. In the above case Lintian should not warn about a > missing standalone license or license text in general. > > Regards, > > Markus > > [1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=883966#25 Speaking just for myself (not as an FTP Team member), I think that's definitely too short. If debian/copyright isn't going to include the license, then I think at a minimum, it needs to point to where to find it. /usr/share/common-licenses may be well known to developers, but I don't think it's reasonable to assume users will automatically know to look there. Scott K
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