On Mon, Dec 12, 2011 at 12:51:59AM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
> During the discussion of allowing Copyright and License fields in the
> header paragraph, one of the things that was raised is the possibility of
> using the DEP-5 format with *just* a header paragraph as a structured way
> of representing the level of detail found in a lot of old-school
> debian/copyright files. It would let people convert the copyright files
> that just say "here's the copyright and license for upstream" to DEP-5
> without implying that they've actually reviewed each file and confirmed
> they are all covered under that license (and not, say, some compatible
> one).
>
> Now, this is a really nit-picky and strange edge case, and I don't really
> mind if we decide that it's not important and rule it out.
Agreed. It is an exception to the general rule that "each file in a
source package has a matching File: section of debian/copyright", with
very little benefits. Allowing such an exception calls for unneeded,
"if..then..else" clauses both in DEP-5 implementations and in the head
of humans when reading/writing debian/copyright files.
It is true, as you imply, that forcing to write "Files: *" might be felt
a stronger statement than just stating a global Copyright / License. But
I do see such a feeling as a good thing: it'd be an incentive to do such
a review, and to do so in a more principled way.
Cheers.
--
Stefano Zacchiroli zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} . o .
Maître de conférences ...... http://upsilon.cc/zack ...... . . o
Debian Project Leader ....... @zack on identi.ca ....... o o o
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