Thorsten Alteholz <alteh...@debian.org> writes: > But what shall be the source for this generation?
> The copyright information that are created by upstream are most of the > time not really up to date. The maintainer can add overrides or patch the upstream files to make them more accurate in this case, no? > Yes, but wouldn't this be valid only for binary packages? The source > package still remains just a big bunch of files, which all might have > different license information. If you build several binary packages, the > license information of each of them might be different. But this should > have no influence on the contents of the license information in the > source package. Sure, but the source package is, by definition, just stuff that the Debian maintainer added plus the work as distributed upstream. Presumably upstream is happy with the license declarations and included license files in their own distribution. If those also contain enough information for a Debian user to find the license, it's not clear to me that there's a problem. Basically, I think this reduces to a question of whether we guarantee the existence of a debian/copyright file summarizing all copyright information in a *source* package, or if the copyright file requirement is aimed primary at binary packages. I think this has come up before, and my recollection of where we ended up in the past is that there probably isn't any *legal* reason to require debian/copyright in source packages. However, there's a substantial *practical* reason, namely that the existing ftpmaster tooling depends on the existence of a source debian/copyright file for the way that they do license reviews, and that some tooling and process changes would be required before we can relax this requirement. I've been pretty distracted away from Debian work for the past year; maybe that work has since been done, or I'm misrecalling the previous discussion? -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
