Hi Peter,
Am 30.03.25 um 21:35 schrieb Peter Wienemann:
2. The copyright documentation in debian/copyright needs more work.
Just by quickly skimming the files I found the following copyright
owners which are not mentioned:
Only main authors are listed in the file. The authors listed by you
did not contribute for about 20 years or more. Therefore, large parts
of the code was already replaced. Also, people who contribute via PRs
are not listed. But we keep their names in the source files to
document the contributions.
Debian Policy 12.5 [0] says:
"A verbatim copy of the package’s copyright information is often
required to be present in /usr/share/doc/PACKAGE/copyright, too; see
Copyright considerations."
Checking the applicable licence for those files (GPL2+) [1], the licence
states:
"You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Program's source
code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously
and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice
and disclaimer of warranty; keep intact all the notices that refer to
this License and to the absence of any warranty; and give any other
recipients of the Program a copy of this License along with the Program."
My understanding of the above is that a _verbatim_ copy of the copyright
information is required in the cases at hand.
While rereading the respective Debian Policy copyright section I noticed
that another Policy requirement is missing in the copyright file:
"In addition, the copyright file must say where the upstream sources (if
any) were obtained, and should include a name or contact address for the
upstream authors."
can you provide more details what exactly you are missing in the
copyright file? I did some updates, you can find the current version here:
https://github.com/LDAPAccountManager/lam/blob/develop/lam-packaging/debian/copyright
Best regards
Roland
