Alex <[email protected]> writes: > I'm not sure whether one has to interpret the current Policy section 2.3 > as requiring to include copyright information _about copyright > information_ itself (or for those files to be DFSG-compliant for that > matter.)
> If that is not the case, then what Sean proposes >> So I think the answer to how such license text files should be >> documented is that they shouldn't be. > is the right way to proceed, IMHO. We have never included licensing information for the license files themselves, nor have we ever treated them as subject to the DFSG. If we did, we would have to remove all GPL software from the distribution since the text of the GPL is not DFSG-free, we could not distribute it under DFSG rules, and therefore we couldn't distribute GPL-covered software since we couldn't provide a copy of the license. Maybe we should write this exception for license texts somewhere formally. I can't imagine it ever changing. > However, there are other files in addition to licenses themselves, which > do not need copyright information, IMHO: e.g., REUSE.toml or .license > files as described by the REUSE spec. I.e., files whose sole purpose is > the conveyance of licensing/copyright information. I'm not familiar with the contents of those files. Insofar as they contain license text, I think this is a variation of the same problem that probably has the same solution. If they are just statements about the copyright holders and names of licenses that are applicable, they're probably not even copyrightable (mere recitations of facts are not creative), but in general could probably be assumed to be under the same license as the rest of the package, like we do with other documentation files, unless there's some statement to the contrary. > If there is consensus on **not** requiring copyright information for all > files which are included in the source/binary package which supply > exactly this type of information, the question becomes how to deal with > Lintian recognizing what those files are exactly. Maybe have a fourth > stanza type in d/copyright which is a list of patterns/paths identifying > files license/copyright information rather than trying to make this > information fit the existing File stanza? I'm not sure d/copyright is the best place to put this (some new file in debian/source may be more appropriate), but sure. -- Russ Allbery ([email protected]) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
