Bug#1111126: Copyright format does not explain how to describe a license text itself

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

Julian Gilbey <julian@d-and-j.net> writes:

> You could work around it by adding a list of all these license files
> to debian/copyright:

> Files:
>   Apache-2
>   GPL-2
>   ...
> Copyright: various
> License: license-text
>  These are the licence texts themselves.

I think the point of the bug report is that we should consider adding a
keyword like "license-text" to the standard to allow explicitly tagging
such files without having each person come up with their own.

I agree that this is a false positive in Lintian, but structurally it's a
difficult false positive to avoid without annoying heuristics. We do
generally expect debian/copyright to cover all of the source, and while
that doesn't include license texts, Lintian doesn't have a great way to
know which files only contain license text and are therefore irrelevant.
So a way of explicitly tagging those files so that it can ignore them
seems reasonable to me.

I'm not sure they should have their own license block, since the whole
point is that we're ignoring them. Maybe there should be a new field that
lists ignored files that don't need to be documented in debian/copyright
for whatever reason? Although I'm not sure this generalizes; I can't
off-hand think of another case besides license texts.

I suppose that mechanism could be a Lintian override, and that's not a bad
answer here. Maybe this case is uncommon enough that an override would be
fine and it's overkill to add a field?

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)              <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>