On Tue, Nov 18, 2025 at 03:29:01PM +0000, Sean Whitton wrote: > > So, yes, there was only one occurrence, sorry for the noise. > > No problem. > > We could put a "must" in Policy but it doesn't seem like it would > achieve much.
Well, I think some historical perspective would be nice. It would be more clear for people to see a must in policy than trying to guess "what happened with this BSD thing which I read in policy and has disappeared misteriously", that would force people to dive into the git repository. I, for example, was not aware that this deprecation was near complete (kudos to Bastian). > Once the file is gone from common-licenses (which seems > imminent) then it would obviously be a bug to refer to it. Well, but deliberately breaking things is not my preferred way to do transitions. After I wrote the above I discovered more occurrences: https://codesearch.debian.net/search?q=%2Fusr%2Fshare%2Fcommon-licenses%2FBSD&literal=1 Naturally, references in debian/changelog do not count, but there are still quite a bunch of manpages referencing the BSD file. Ideally, I'd like to see those reported as "important" before they are serious, because switching from "not reported at all" to serious seems a little bit harsh to me, even if this has been policy for a long time now. To comply with DFSG, I'd like to drop BSD from base-files only when all packages stop referencing the file (in d/copyright and similar places). Thanks.
