Am 28.12.2017 um 22:19 schrieb Jonathan Nieder: > Hi, > > Markus Koschany wrote: > >> I still have to quote license texts verbatim. The only >> "advantage" of the old format is that I can format d/copyright more >> freely but the same information must be present anyway. It is simply not >> feasible to educate all upstreams in existence to write a Debian-like >> copyright file. They rightly say that it is not their problem how >> downstreams process and treat their copyright information. > > This may be the source of my confusion. I am used to upstreams being > cooperative when I ask them for a clear LICENSE file, especially when I > provide them with a patch to do so. > > Some licenses even require that. Upstream has to follow the license, > too, when they incorporate code from third parties. Even in a > situation where they wrote all the code themselves, making license > compliance easy for downstream users helps adoption of their code. > > In other words, I have almost never experienced the kind of resistance > you are talking about. > > Even a package that adopts copyright-format 1.0 does not need to put > per-file license information in debian/copyright. It is perfectly > okay to have a single 'Files: *' paragraph with the project's license. > Some maintainers prefer to maintain per-file license information since > they think it makes their lives easier. With a grin here: You must be a very lucky maintainer or you maintain neither Java packages or games. :) Sure there are nice upstreams and I have certainly encountered more helpful than obnoxious ones in the past. But you have to consider the following: The more packages you (team-)maintain the more likely it is that your scenario becomes less and less ideal. A few examples: freeorion: [1] Rather sophisticated game GPL-2 licensed but with various contributions / incorporations under different licenses. So I can't just write Files: * -> GPL-2. I have to list all licenses with separate paragraphs and there is no way to change that without sacrificing accuracy. But d/copyright would be a lot more readable if I did not have to quote some of those licenses verbatim. bullet: [2] C++ library under a permissive license with various contributions licensed under different licenses. I became fed up with checking the data and examples directories with each upstream release because of the various licenses and copyright holders in those directories. Fortunately we don't need those for a functioning library but it would have been nice for someone who wants to build demos and examples on a local system. -> forced trade-off between usefulness, d/copyright and my maintenance time. Nothing upstream could help us with. ufoai-maps: [3] ~5000 files, a lot of CC licensed files. Only manageable because upstream provides a copyright file in their own format. I had to write my own little parser to make it suitable for d/copyright. Checking this all by hand would be a nightmare. Nothing upstream could help us with. From their point of view they have provided all legally required information. netbeans: [4] ~80000 files with dozens of licenses and hundreds of contributors. This is only maintainable copyright-wise because I remove lots of files when repacking the tarball. From my perspective every simplification of d/copyright helps. If you think my workflow is to blame here, I'm all ears now how I could be more efficient in maintaining just these four packages. ;) Regards, Markus [1] http://metadata.ftp-master.debian.org/changelogs/main/f/freeorion/unstable_copyright [2] http://metadata.ftp-master.debian.org/changelogs/main/b/bullet/unstable_copyright [3] http://metadata.ftp-master.debian.org/changelogs/main/u/ufoai-maps/unstable_copyright [4] http://metadata.ftp-master.debian.org/changelogs/main/n/netbeans/unstable_copyright
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