On Fri, Aug 26, 2005 at 01:51:44PM +0200, kabi wrote: > > Debian distributes _binaries_ and that's what your packages ship, binary > > files with documentation. The documentation file debian/copyright is > > mandatory for all packages and its contents are too. It is a way to > > determine > > what > > > > a) the license of a package is > > b) who is/are the upstream author/s > > c) who holds copyright for the source > > But have you evere checked the distrubtions of avifile - > i.e. the /usr/share/doc/avifile-utils directory ? > There are files which contain this information > (CREDITS COPYING LICENCING and so on
I don't care if you are shipping upstream files there. You _have_ to have that information in debian/copyright. That's where policy mandates that information and that's where people will go look for it. If every packaged shipped their copyright info in the file that upstream uses then every time somebody wanted to look for it he would have to review all the /usr/share/doc/ contents and determine what file includes that. That's why policy states that information should be in debian/copyright. There's actually no need to ship the other files (and that generates a lintian error by the way). > > A Debian developer will look for the debian/copyright file, like I did, > > Ohh that means you ignore the rest of the files ? No, it means I look for their fist. Because it's the canonical place. You can't expect all 15,000 packages in Debian to have their copyright file in whatever file upstream decided it should be. It would be crazy if every license information and (c) statement were in different files in different packages. > As I said - if the whole thing we are talking about is that I should > join the other files distributed with packege into copyright file > sure it's not a problem... Don't blindly concatenate all files. And notice, anyway, that the files you mentioned _do_not_ cover the (c) of the libraries that the people from avifile have ripped from other projects and include there. > > Mention one that is missing from Debian because of this issue. If you > > don't want to adhere to Debian standards then leave the project and orphan > > your packages. > > ffmpeg, mplayer to name few... Have you seen http://packages.debian.org/ffmpeg ? It's been there since July last year! As for mplayer, it's in the NEW queue, and it will probably be in Debian soon. Care to mention any packages that are _not_ patent encumbered? Regards Javier
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