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

[Julian Gilbey <julian@d-and-j.net>]

Hi,

On Sat, Aug 16, 2025 at 07:02:36PM +0200, Guillem Jover wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> [...]
On Fri, 2025-08-15 at 10:20:29 -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> > 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.

Agreed.

> > [...]
> 
> The problem with a lintian-specific solution, is that the information
> in debian/copyright is being used by more tools, that can easily trip
> over the same problem with unmatched files in the source tree.
> 
> So it seems best if this was encoded in debian/copyright, some way or
> another.
> 
> The proposed license-text (or something alike), has the appeal that it
> seems to faithfully represent what is going on, and in addition should
> work out of the box (as in no need to modify tooling). It might simply
> require adding such pseudo-license-name exception in the spec.

Though the current copyright-format 1.0 format requires both a
Copyright field and a License field with the license explicitly given.
So the current tools would presumably not be happy with:

Files:
 GPL-2
 GPL-3
License: license-text

but would need to see the elaborated version I suggested about.  A
copyright-format 1.1 could permit this exception, but I'm dubious
whether it's currently worth updating the copyright-format version for
this when almost no packages do it.  Even though separating out the
license text file is the right thing to do for all packages that
include it within the package (presumably the vast majority of source
packages), almost no-one currently does so.

Best wishes,

   Julian