First, let me apologize for my last mail in this thread, it had been a little too rude/harsh/direct. My fault, sorry. (We all should calm down, flaming won't help)
On 11696 March 1977, Russ Allbery wrote: > Joerg Jaspert <jo...@debian.org> writes: >> We require, and have seen nothing to convince us otherwise, that Debian >> maintainers need to do the basic work of listing each copyright holder >> in debian/copyright, as seen in the source files and AUTHORS list or >> equivalent (if any). > So, the question being raised on this thread is why? What purpose does > this work serve? Multiple, honestly. One is that there is one place where to look for that information. Thats a minor thing, really, but one. Then there is following Debians policy. And then we also follow the licenses, especially those that require it. Also, keep in mind what Mark wrote elsewhere. He asked the DPL to let SPI get us some lawyers input on the question. Thats probably the best course. > The argument against doing it is that it takes increased time over just > verifying the licenses of every file and requires ongoing maintenance that > could be spent on tasks more directly related to improving the > software. You do have to check every file anyway, otherwise you can't be sure about your copyright file listing all the licenses your package uses. And I sincerely hope noone will contest the need to list the various licenses a package uses? > If the argument in favor is just that Policy says something along those > lines, well, as discussed in this thread, I want to revise that Policy > section anyway. Feel free to. :) > Is the reason that you feel most licenses require preservation of the > copyright notice and it's easier to enforce it uniformly for all copyright > files? Is there some other larger reason why is this important for the > project? (Please note that I'm not assuming that you have no reason. I > just don't understand, from the discussion so far, what it is. We can't > really have a meaningful discussion until we're all on the same page) Yes, thats definitely part of the reason. Also, if people would look at how NEW had been handled in the past up to now, instead of purely exaggerating and taking actions from there, they would have found out that we are usually pretty lenient with this enforcement. We do mention it when we see it and whenever we do have a reject anyway, like when people forgot to mention a license at all. Rejection solely based on missing (C) notices might (have) happen(ed), but should be seldom and when there are lots of them with a license requiring them. Also, if just a small set is missing and nothing else would block accepting the package, we quite often accept the package and send a comment to the maintainer saying that the following couple of lines should be added at the next upload. -- bye, Joerg Some AM after a mistake: Sigh. One shouldn't AM in the early AM, as it were. <grin>
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