Bill Allombert wrote: > Russ Allbery wrote: > > Jonathan Nieder writes: > > > Charles Plessy wrote: > > >> My personal opinion is that it is best to focus the Debian copyright file > > >> on the goal of respecting licenses and the copyright law, and to leave > > >> to the upstream documentation the difficult task of stating who is author > > >> and who is not.
This is what I would prefer too. > > > Just like naming the location from which the upstream source code was > > > downloaded is useful, giving contact information (at least a name, > > > mailing list, or web forum) for the upstream maintainer is useful, no? The documented "Upstream-Contact:" field handles that case nicely. Specifying the upstream contact isn't the confusing part. > > The context in which this came up was GNU time. A couple of people were > > primarily responsible for the development of the package, under the aegis > > of the FSF (which is the copyright holder, as with most GNU software). > > There has been no new upstream release since 1996 and those people are not > > apparently involved in development any more. The contact point for the > > software officially is the bug-gnu-ut...@gnu.org mailing list, which is a > > generic list for a variety of minor GNU packages. > > > > I think it's very unclear what Policy expects one to do with that. > > I do not think it is such a big deal. GNU time come with a changelog file > which says: > > Thu Jul 11 12:37:17 1996 David J MacKenzie <d...@catapult.va.pubnix.com> > > * Version 1.7. > > So the original author is David J MacKenzie. But that is simply the most recent upstream changelog entry. Using it would ignore all of the previous contributors. Plus the upstream AUTHORS file attributes David Keppel with creating the original version. I think David Keppel would be attributed with being the "original author" by a common language use of the term. Even though David MacKenzie contributed significantly, perhaps even to doing a majority of the total effort to it, after that point. > bug-gnu-ut...@gnu.org might be the new contact point, but since they did not > make a single > release in all this time, I would not have too high expectation on their > responsiveness. Right. There hasn't been any responsiveness from the currently designated maintainer. But other representatives of the GNU Project do monitor and respond to that address. Depending upon the query and the issue you could hold a valid discussion there. > (and I do not think policy should require updating the copyright file if the > upstream version did not change). There were two parts to this. One is that the copyright file wasn't completely correct and needed to be updated. The other is the general desire within Debian to use the new machine readable file format. It is listed as optional in a subsection of Policy but everywhere else it is documented to the point that it looks like a requirement. Since I was modifying the copyright file I gave it my best attempt to use the preferred format and in the development this issue raised discussion from the differing opinions of what it meant and how it should be implemented. Bob
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