On Friday, May 16, 2025 6:15:51 AM Mountain Standard Time Roland Hieber wrote: > Package: lintian > Version: 2.122.0 > Severity: normal > > Dear maintainers, > > While packaging composefs for Debian (Bug #1100914), lintian gave me the > following informational warning: > > I: composefs source: unused-license-paragraph-in-dep5-copyright lgpl-2.1+ > and gpl-2+ or apache-2 and gpl-2 or apache-2 [debian/copyright:8] > > My debian/copyright (see [1]) includes License paragraphs in several Files > stanzas as well as one summarizing the packaging terms of the project as a > whole in the Header stanza. This is according to the DEP-5 spec [2]: > > "The Copyright and License fields in the header stanza may complement but > do not replace the fields in the Files stanzas. If present, they summarise > the copyright notices or redistribution terms for the package as a whole." > > [1]: > https://salsa.debian.org/rohieb/composefs/-/blob/2f1d3d15411a2459fd/debian/ co > pyright [2]: > https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/#header-sta > nza > > Apparently the additional License paragraph in the Header stanza is confusing > lintian (or I'm not understanding the spec correctly, please inform me if this > is the case :-))
As a mater of practice, I haver never seen a Debian package with a license
field in the header stanza, even though the documentation talks about being
able to do that as an option. Everyone just puts that information in the
"Files: *" stanza, which is where people are accustomed to look for it.
Perhaps the documentation should be updated.
In addition, looking over your debian/copyright file, you can combine the
stanzas that begin on lines 25, 30, 48, 64, and 68 into one stanza. This is
because they all share the same license (GPL-2 or Apache-2). It is not
necessary that they all share the same copyright.
The DEP-5 format stanzas can be interpreted as saying the following: “All of
the files in this stanza are released under the license specified. If you
want to make any changes to these files or redistribute them, you need to
follow the requirements of the license. If, for some reason, you need to
relicense all of these files under a different license, you would need to get
permission of all of the copyright holders listed in the stanza. If you would
like to relicense only one of these files, look at the header to the file as
well as the other upstream copyright information to figure out who hold the
copyright for the individual file you are interested in.”
For the combined stanza described above, your copyright line would be:
Copyright: 2023 Alexander Larsson <al...@redhat.com>
2021 Giuseppe Scrivano <giuse...@scrivano.org>
2021 Alibaba Cloud
2017-2018 HUAWEI, Inc.
Obviously, a lot of the copyright information is missing from the upstream
repository. Often, when this is the case, I contact upstream to see if they
can add a comprehensive copyright assertion in COPYING for all files not
otherwise annotated in their individual file headers.
Note that the above recommendations were made just from reading over the
existing debian/copyright file and the upstream COPYING. I assumed the
current contents of debian/copyright correctly describes the copyright and
licensing of the upstream files.
The other note I would make is that it is common to start with a "Files: *"
stanza, then list a “Files: debian/*” stanza, and then include any overrides
to the upstream files. Here is a complex debian/copyright example you can
refer to:
https://salsa.debian.org/debian/courier/-/blob/master/debian/copyright?
ref_type=heads
--
Soren Stoutner
so...@debian.org
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