Re: [DEP5] License field in the first paragraph ?
On ma, 2011-01-17 at 21:11 -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
> 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.
There seems to be consensus to add an optional License field to the
first paragraph. Anyone want to make a patch, and perhaps include some
version of Russ's explanation above as rationale, so that we don't get
endless questions about this in the future?
--
Blog/wiki/website hosting with ikiwiki (free for free software):
http://www.branchable.com/
Reply to: