Re: Inconsistent assertions about copyright notices
Ben Finney <ben+debian@benfinney.id.au> writes:
> In light of recent discussion [0] about ‘debian/copyright’ and what a
ENOFOOTNOTE
> 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.
> 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?
Well, they're correct that copyright messages shouldn't be in either of
those places. I suspect that this wording is sloppy and what's meant by
copyright statements is actually copyright and license statements,
particularly in the case of 3.9.1. People sometimes want to use
maintainer scripts to present, for instance, the GPL notice, and that's
not an appropriate use of prompting.
But I suspect that what you're concerned with is the statements that the
copyright file is for copyright statements and that those statements
belong there.
Have we reached any consensus otherwise? There's been some discussion,
but I've not seen anything definitive, nor have I seen much analysis of
the requirements around retaining copyright notices that are imposed by
some of the DFSG-free licenses.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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