Hi Reinhard, Thanks a lot for your interest!
On Sat, Dec 20, 2025 at 05:47:59PM -0500, Reinhard Tartler wrote: > > I've taken a look at this package as found at > https://salsa.debian.org/debian/publicfile/-/tree/debian/0.52-13?ref_type=tags > and wanted to share my thoughts on it with you: > > > nothing in the source code contains any copyright statement. I do see > that https://cr.yp.to/distributors.html places publicfile 0.5.2 with the > sha256 checksum > 3f9fcf737bfe48910812cc357a31bf1f2e3da2490dbd175ce535830f251c08ef into > the public domain, and I wish that was clearly visible in the tarball. That would've been better indeed. Otoh I guess we can live with the current situation, and I'd feel embarrased to ask the author to release a new tarball after all these years... > In debian/copyright, I see a statement to debian/patches/errno.patch > that attributes the copyright to [email protected]. I see two issues with that: > a) you cannot assign a copyright to an email address. It needs to be a > person or similar b) the comment below then claims that this patch > wasn't subject to copyright law. That's a bold statement and unlikely to > be true given how many jurisdictions we have on this planet. > > Please ask the original author(s) of the patch about the licensing > terms, and suggest public domain. Do copy their response in > debian/copyright as appropriate. The patch contains of 3 lines of code, of which 2 are the same. I believe one could make a good point argueing the patch is so small it isn't copyrightable? That's what I was trying to do in d/copyright. With Copyright: 2002 [email protected] I was trying to express the contact info for the patch is [email protected], and it was published in 2002. > I would recommend to REJECT this package until the licencing terms of > the patches are clarified. Actually, the situation with debian/patches/filetype.patch is tricky. I am considering contacting the author of that one (with me luck...) See d/copyright and d/changelog for details. > On a personal note? Do you expect further updates and releases of > publicfile? How frequently do you expect them to happen, and what > licensing terms do you expect them to be placed on? No, I don't expect any further upstream updates. I plan to keep adjusting the software so that it keeps running fine on Debian. Bye, Joost
