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Re: possibly exhausted ftp-masters (Re: Do we still value contributions?



Sean Whitton <spwhitton@spwhitton.name> writes:

> The main reason I referred to dgit's copyright file in this discussion
> was because I think the "Contributions are accepted upstream ..."
> section is useful to include in d/copyright rather than somewhere else
> in the source package, as then all licensing and copyright information
> is in one place.  I don't think its inclusion there would noticeably
> slow down NEW review.

I'm going to disagree here (although I don't feel strongly about it): I
don't think this belongs in the debian/copyright file.  I think of the
copyright file as a repository for the licensing information and mandatory
notices for the package as delivered as a Debian package, and this isn't
any of those things, so it makes the file longer and is more for anyone
reviewing licensing to read through, while (I think) not being relevant to
the license of the code or binaries.

This sort of upstream contribution policy in my mind should be put as
close as possible to the place where someone is submitting code upstream.
If the project is based on pull requests, for instance, it should ideally
be prominant in the interface where one submits a pull request.  For a
package where most contributions are expected to come through the BTS, I
would instead put the "Contributions are accepted upstream..." paragraph
in README.Debian and the certificate of origin in a separate file in
/usr/share/doc, since I think that would increase the chances that someone
who was preparing a patch would read it. (I personally would never look at
debian/copyright when submitting a patch to the BTS, but would probably
read README.Debian.)

This is just one anecdotal opinion, though, so please take with a grain of
salt.

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


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