Hello Stuart,
On Sat, Dec 30 2017, Stuart Prescott wrote:
> I find the proposal that we should use "[GPL-3+]" (#883950) and the
> proposal that a "License-Grant" field be added (#786470) to be largely
> contradictory. I think accepting (or even pursuing) one should mean
> killing the other:
>
> * The "License-Grant" proposal is seeking to find a place in the
> copyright file for yet more boilerplate so that we can record what is
> claimed to be very important information that we should not be
> omitting ("This program is free software; …").
>
> * The "[GPL-3+] proposal" is seeking to remove what is claimed to be
> completely unimportant boilerplate, including the licence grant text
> and more ("On Debian systems, …").
>
> Recent discussions on other mailng lists have demonstrated that we
> don't really know what we want from d/copyright and I guess these two
> contradictory proposals illustrate that further.
Right. The idea is to put both of these into the spec so that both
sides can do what they want to do, but it will be properly documented.
> Apart from /u/s/common-licenses/README, perhaps documenting the
> meaning of "+" is as simple as adding /usr/share/common-licenses to
> /etc/motd since that is what we already use that to point users to the
> existence of /usr/share/*/ copyright at present.
>
>
> While recognising that you're asking about the "+" not the brackets at
> this stage, a couple of comments on the format from the perspective of
> a maintainer of code that looks at d/copyright.
>
> TL;DR: I'd prefer we didn't use the brackets or bump version numbers,
> hence challenging this now before it becomes too entrenched. [...]
Hopefully I have this right: the proposal is to relax the requirement
that there be more lines of clarification beyond "License: foo" or
"License: foo+" when it's the case that /usr/share/common-licenses/foo
exists?
And to avoid the copyright-format becoming unreadable to local admins,
add something to the default /etc/motd pointing them at
/usr/share/common-licenses?
This addresses all the concerns of both Markus and I earlier in this
bug, I think, and avoids the square brackets. It also avoids the
version bump because we are adding to /etc/motd instead.
> A final more general comment -- please include the people who write
> code based on the copyright-format specification in the discussion of
> specification changes and include them early on. (cme, lintian,
> sources.d.o, python-debian are the ones that come to mind; there are
> probably others) People who write parsers are probably policy wonks
> who read the list anyway, but it's worth checking.
Okay, I'll try to keep this in mind.
--
Sean Whitton
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