Bart Martens <ba...@debian.org> writes: > The previous package maintainers are also copyright holders of debian/* > so debian/copyright needs an update for that.
While a package sponsor can of course ask for whatever they'd like before being willing to sponsor a package, I do think it's worth noting that the majority of packages in Debian do not record the copyright statements for all contributors to the debian/* packaging, nor is this something that we're enforcing on an archive-wide basis. It's a nice thing to do, but I'm not sure how important it really is given that all those contributions are already documented in debian/changelog. > The file debian/copyright "should name the original authors", and David > Keppel is such an author. For the purposes of satisfying this portion of Policy, I think that treating "authors" as meaning the same thing as "copyright holders" is quite reasonable. For GNU software, that means the Free Software Foundation, as that's what's listed in all the copyright statements. I think asking people to document more authorship than upstream provides in upstream's copyright statements is asking for quite a lot, and also is a standard that we are not following in most of the rest of the archive. I certainly don't bother to do that with my packages; documenting upstream's copyright notices seems sufficient to me. If upstream doesn't consider it important enough to record, I don't consider it a mandatory part of being a Debian package maintainer to go do that historical research myself, assuming that there are no legal issues raised by the omission. If upstream provides a separate CREDITS or THANKS file supplementing their legal notices, I generally install that as a documentation file like any other (but don't bother to invent copyright notices for all the people listed there to add to debian/coypright). -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-mentors-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/87395moa1q....@windlord.stanford.edu
