Bug#975250: clarify gathering together of copyright information

[Sean Whitton <spwhitton@spwhitton.name>]

Hello,

On Thu 19 Nov 2020 at 05:07PM +01, Marc Haber wrote:

> /usr/share/doc/debian-policy/copyright-format-1.0.txt.gz says
>
> |    The Copyright field collects all relevant copyright notices for the files
> |    of this paragraph. Not all copyright notices may apply to every individual
> |    file, and years of publication for one copyright holder may be gathered
> |    together. For example, if file A has:
> |
> |  Copyright 2008 John Smith
> |  Copyright 2009 Angela Watts
> |
> |    and file B has:
> |
> |  Copyright 2010 Angela Watts
> |
> |    a single paragraph may still be used for both files. The Copyright field
> |    for that paragraph would contain:
> |
> |  Copyright 2008 John Smith
> |  Copyright 2009, 2010 Angela Watts
>
> But what if file A says
>
> |  Copyright 2008 John Smith
> |  Copyright 2005-2015 Angela Watts
>
>     and file B has:
>
> |  Copyright 2010 Angela Watts
>
> Can this be gathered together to:
>
> |  Copyright 2008 John Smith
> |  Copyright 2005-2015 Angela Watts
>
> or does it have to be
>
> |  Copyright 2008 John Smith
> |  Copyright 2009, 2005-2015 Angela Watts
>
> ?

The former.  If you'd like to propose a patch making this clearer we
could get it applied.

-- 
Sean Whitton