Javier Serrano Polo <jav...@jasp.net> writes: > Copyright information, like changelogs and manuals, is not technically > required by software.
> I propose this enhancement to section 12.5: > Every package must be accompanied by a verbatim copy of its > copyright information and distribution license in the > file /usr/share/doc/package/copyright > or /usr/share/doc/source-copyright/copyright; the latter may not > be installed. [...] > [...] and the first package Depends on the second. > Alternatively, /usr/share/doc/package may not exist if the > package Recommends source-copyright, which comes from the same > source. [...] Why would you not use the existing *-doc package construction, which seems to accomplish exactly the same goal and is already fairly standard practice for packages with large documentation directories? > Additional benefits: > 1. Putting this information in a separate architecture-independent > package reduces repository disk usage. The additional metadata required for the extra packages is going to eliminate any possible gain you would get here. > 2. It helps to solve the Multi-Arch file refcounting problem. We've already solved that by not allowing different versions of multi-arch packages to be simultaneously installed. To relax that constraint would require dealing with far more than just the copyright file, and would need a more comprehensive solution. So this doesn't really help one way or the other. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
