On 16/08/15 17:23, Thorsten Alteholz wrote: > On Sun, 16 Aug 2015, Santiago Vila wrote: >> To allow for the file to be automatically generated at build time, >> which in turn avoids useless duplication of license text in the source >> package. > > But what shall be the source for this generation?
I've uploaded a couple of packages where debian/copyright is generated by merging debian/copyright.in (hand-edited machine-readable copyright stanzas with full license text omitted), and debian/*.license (verbatim Creative Commons license text), via a script that indents the license text by 1 space and puts "." on blank lines. This seems exactly the sort of tedious mechanical operation that the computer should do for me. I would love to not have to do this (see <https://bugs.debian.org/768292>, <https://bugs.debian.org/795402>) but at the moment it's the only way I can see to have debian/copyright in a form that is easy to modify. At the moment, I also include the generated version in source packages, but this seems a bit silly; I can't speak for the actual ftpmasters, but if I was a NEW-queue reviewer, I would strongly prefer to be able to say "ah yes, this refers to an external CC-BY-3.0-US whose content is identical to one we've already reviewed, I can skip that part" rather than wading through adwaita-icon-theme's 88K copyright file. adwaita-icon-theme and game-data-packager are the packages I've uploaded so far that do that. If someone (e.g. the ftp-masters) can give me a list of the software that would need to be patched before this was acceptable (for example packages.debian.org + whatever tool the ftp-masters use to review NEW), I'll look into proposing patches. S