[ Dropping CC for Simon and Russ because I know for sure they are in -policy ].
On Sun, Aug 16, 2015 at 06:23:52PM +0200, Thorsten Alteholz wrote: > But what shall be the source for this generation? I was basically doing "cat debian/copyright.in LICENSE" Not anything AI-style, and not trying to fix the original LICENSE. In this particular case, LICENSE is now MIT-style and not a big file anymore, as it used to be, so there is not a great benefit in the file being generated automatically. It will be easy to stop doing that, and that's what I will probably do. The case explained by Simon is more elaborated and a *lot* more interesting. > >I know that we usually treat packages as "whole works", but in theory > >a package might well be an aggregation of different programs having > >different copyright and licenses, in which case it would be > >theoretically possible to have a different copyright file for each of > >them. > > Yes, but wouldn't this be valid only for binary packages? > [...] In the hypothetical case I imagine, the copyright files for the binary packages would be different, and then you can't make the one in the source to be a copy of *any* of them, as policy requires. On Sun, Aug 16, 2015 at 10:41:16AM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote: > 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. Yes, I think this practical reason (the ability to extract automatically copyright files from source packages) is the main reason why debian/copyright is required. So we could just add it to policy as a rationale. Thanks.
