Bug#685506: debian-policy: Please add field Files-Excluded to machine readable copyright files definition
On Fri, Jan 28, 2022 at 09:08:17AM +0100, Andreas Tille wrote:
> Hi,
>
> > It should be possible to use it with the plain old copyright format too,
> > otherwise we are kind of renegating on our promise that the machine
> > readable copyright format be optionnal.
>
> Did we ever promised this?
Yes we did.
> I personally would rather think that excluding files from the upstream
> source is a pretty good reason to make DEP5 mandatory *for these cases*.
> Besides a sensible way of documentation it saves maintainer time to
> simply use uscan to obtain a proper tarball.
The issue is that mk-origtargz does not actually need any field from
DEP5, it only needs the extra fields it specifies. It would be more
sensible for mk-origtargz to get this information from debian/watch
or debian/mk-origtargz.
While the new copyright format is part of the policy package, it is
a separate specification and is not intented for package to put
configuration information there.
>From the point of view of binary package, the information is quite often
meaningless since there is not explanation why a file was removed,
files that are removed are often regenerated at built time and shipped
and the file not removed from the source might still not be shipped in
any binary package generated from it. Important feature removal should
rather be documented in README.Debian.
So it is quite sufficient for this data to be in the source package
only.
Cheers,
--
Bill. <ballombe@debian.org>
Imagine a large red swirl here.
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