> 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.
Le Sun, Aug 16, 2015 at 10:37:20PM +0200, Santiago Vila a écrit :
> 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.
Dear Santiago and everybody,
how about the following ? (in section 4.5)
--- a/policy.sgml
+++ b/policy.sgml
@@ -1822,12 +1822,16 @@ zope.
<sect id="dpkgcopyright">
<heading>Copyright: <file>debian/copyright</file></heading>
<p>
Every {+source+} package must be accompanied by a verbatim copy
of its copyright information and distribution license in the
file
[-<file>/usr/share/doc/<var>package</var>/copyright</file>-]{+<file>debian/copyright</file><footnote>+}
{+ The <file>debian/copyright</file> file must be present, to+}
{+ ease the review of new packages and to facilitate automatic+}
{+ extraction of this information. It may be generated from+}
{+ templates, but not at build time.</footnote>+}
(see <ref id="copyrightfile"> for further details). Also see
<ref id="pkgcopyright"> for further considerations related to
copyrights for packages.
</p>
</sect>
<sect>
Even after that change, the sentence "Every package must be accompanied by a
verbatim copy of its copyright information and distribution license in the file
/usr/share/doc/package/copyright" still appears twice in the Policy.
Have a nice day,
--
Charles Plessy
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan
