On Sat, 13 Jun 2009, Mike Hommey wrote: > On Sat, Jun 13, 2009 at 10:06:31AM +0100, Neil Williams wrote: > > Requiring any details of precisely which files are affected makes the > > whole thing impossible because that requires some form of mass-update > > (or at least mass check of individual files) at every upstream release. > > Let's just drop the whole idea for Files: - if some packages find it > > useful, then the Files: field can be optional but it cannot be sensible > > to mandate it for large upstream teams. > > Plus, the per-file copyright information doesn't reflect anything > for binary packages, since they refer to source files. And per > source file licensing information is available in the source > tarball, where the copyright file has no use.
The main reason to include per-file copyright information in the copyright file is to make sure that you've actually examined the copyright of all of the files and to allow for automatically generated[1] machine-readable copyright files to be updated sanely. The per-file copyright information should not be mandated, but the standard should allow for it to be present for the above reasons. Don Armstrong 1: We probably won't ever reach 100% automation, but the more it's possible to generate and update the copyright file automatically, the easier it is for maintainers to generate and maintain them. Ideally the machine-readable files will be so easy to generate that people will transition simply because it wastes less time. -- I'd sign up in a hot second for any cellular company whose motto was: "We're less horrible than a root canal with a cold chisel." -- Cory Doctorow http://www.donarmstrong.com http://rzlab.ucr.edu -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
