On Sat, Dec 28, 2019 at 09:47:20AM +0000, Sean Whitton wrote: > Hello Thorsten, > > On Thu 26 Dec 2019 at 04:30pm +01, Thorsten Alteholz wrote: > > > Make the machine-readable copyright file mandatory. > > It is much easier to "parse" than just a bunch of copyright information. > > The other side of this is that using that format tends to encourage > documenting a bunch of information about the source package which we > don't need to document, but which the ftp team member processing NEW is > still going to have to verify as correct. > > So I'd like to append to your point: do take advantage of the > machine-readable copyright format for complex source packages, but don't > add more "Files:" stanzas than are strictly necessary. > > For example, > > Files: * > Copyright: (c) 1994 A. Developer > License: GPL-2+ > > Files: foo.js baz/bar.js > Copyright: (c) 1995 Google > License: GPL-2+ > > could be combined into > > Files: * > Copyright: (c) 1994 A. Developer > (c) 1995 Google > License: GPL-2+ > > i.e. you generally only need separate stanzas when the license is > different, not simply because there are different coyright holders. In > most cases you should should not need more stanzas than there are > different licenses. > Oh, wow. I've been doing this wrong all along. I am not sure how I developed the impression that it was necessary to distinguish different copyright holders (even same copyright holders with different copyright years), but your approach is most certainly simpler and more compact.
How about licenses with slight variations? I'm thinking BSD-like and MIT-like licenses which mention the copyright holder usually as the first thing in the in license text. Could those be combined into a single stanza in the way you describe? Also, I assume that it is good practice to verify actual license texts included by upstream against known good sources since that seems like something FTP masters would have to do as well. Is that correct? Regards, -Roberto -- Roberto C. Sánchez
