Re: [DEP5] License field in the first paragraph ?
Ben Finney <ben+debian@benfinney.id.au> writes:
> Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org> writes:
>> I am worried that there was a misundertanding about the purpose of the
>> first paragraph's Copyright field: from my reading of the current
>> version of the DEP (and independantly of how my opinion on how it
>> should be)
> The explanation in the DEP doesn't really make it clear why this is
> needed, as opposed to an initial “Files: *” paragraph with the “package
> as a whole” copyright and license values.
> Where is the rationale for having Copyright apply in the header?
We talked about this several times, I think. We should probably capture
the rationale in the standard since it keeps coming up again.
Files: * implies that each individual file is covered by that copyright
and license. The intent of putting Copyright and License in the top
header was to specify the copyright and license for the collective
distribution, separate from the copyright and license for any individual
file.
I'm not sure how License fell out of that. It was always supposed to
include both, I think. Having Copyright without License isn't horribly
useful.
I was one of the people who specifically requested this, since one of the
purposes to which I want to put DEP-5 requires some way of specifying the
collective copyright and license for a package as a whole, regardless of
the individual licenses of some files. This is not the same thing as a
Files: * block that's overridden by more specific Files: blocks.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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