Inconsistent assertions about copyright notices

[Ben Finney <ben+debian@benfinney.id.au>]

Howdy all,

In light of recent discussion [0] about ‘debian/copyright’ and what a
Debian package should include in that file, I would like to see some
clean-up of the current (residual?) assertions of what needs to be
included.

Policy §12.5, “Copyright information”, appears to be the complete set of
direct normative statements of what's required:

    12.5. Copyright information
    ---------------------------

         Every package must be accompanied by a verbatim copy of its copyright
         and distribution license in the file
         `/usr/share/doc/<package>/copyright'.  This file must neither be
         compressed nor be a symbolic link.

         In addition, the copyright file must say where the upstream sources
         (if any) were obtained.  It should name the original authors of the
         package and the Debian maintainer(s) who were involved with its
         creation.

         Packages in the _contrib_ or _non-free_ archive areas should state in
         the copyright file that the package is not part of the Debian
         GNU/Linux distribution and briefly explain why.
    […]

Those are all the requirements given in that section for what the
‘debian/copyright’ file should contain.

There are side references that seem to assert additional requirements:

    3.4. The description of a package
    ---------------------------------
    […]
         Copyright statements and other administrivia should not be
         included either (that is what the copyright file is for).

and:

    3.9.1. Prompting in maintainer scripts
    --------------------------------------
    […]
         Copyright messages do not count as vitally important (they
         belong in `/usr/share/doc/<package>/copyright')[…]

Both of these seem to imply that copyright notices need to be in
‘debian/copyright’, but §12.5 doesn't say that at all. Am I right that
these assertions in §3.4 and §3.9.1 are false and should be removed?

-- 
 \                         “I'm a great lover, I'll bet.” —Emo Philips |
  `\                                                                   |
_o__)                                                                  |
Ben Finney