Format of the copyright file
Hi,
I'm struggling with the policy requirement that the copyright and
licensing information must be in one file debian/copyright, including
the complete license text except for the common licenses.
I'm trying to solve #218105 for tetex-base, which is a huge collection
of many contributions, large and small, from different authors. I have
therefore written a script that uses existing information about which
files belong to which CTAN package (adapted from the TeXLive package)
and about the licenses for each CTAN package in the TeX Catalogue and
semi-automatically creates the copyright file from this information,
after I've verified the license information in the Catalogue is correct.
Even without including license texts, this leads to a huge file:
http://packages.debian.org/changelogs/pool/main/t/tetex-base/tetex-base_3.0-17/tetex-base.copyright
currently has 394 lines with 1737 words, on my local system I'm at 425
lines currently. And I've only verified a *small* fraction of the
packages included.
In my opinion the purpose of the requirement to have one copyright file
is to make it easy to access this information, but I think this is all
but easy if the file is a monster as tetex-base's will be, even without
including the license text. I think I would serve users and developers
better if I collected the license texts in a separate file, indicating
in the list of packages where the license text can be found. The
current lppl would add 416 lines of text, and now I've come across a
package that's under a version of the artistic license (which itself
looks fine to me,
http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/debian-tex/tetex-src/trunk/source/latex/fancyvrb/artistic2.txt?op=file&rev=0&sc=0)
which would add another 192 lines.
Do debian-legal folks agree that in this case it is okay to violate the
words of the Policy and go for a separate licenses.texts file?
If you think that this is not acceptable, what else would you suggest to
actually make the copyright file useful?
TIA, Frank
--
Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX)
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