Hi Tony,
On 05.02.22 17:26, tony mancill wrote:
I believe there is ambiguity here. For this bug to be severity serious,
doesn't policy need to be revised to change "should" to "must" so that
it is clear that **every** upstream author **must** be enumerated in
debian/copyright? If this is a requirement for software to be part of
Debian, policy should say so directly.
I am afraid you are mixing two different things here.
The paragraph above is about the header section of the machine readable
copyright file. You are right, information about the upstream author must
not be present there. This field is just meant to easily find a person to
contact for this software.
The severity of the bug is related to ยง2.3 which says that
debian/copyright must have "... verbatim copy of its distribution
license(s) ...". This means that all copyright holder must be listed in
the corresponding license blocks below the header. If some are missing,
you both infringe policy and don't comply to the licenses. Both violations
justify a severity of "serious".
In my personal opinion, policy requiring an exhaustive debian/copyright
is less useful for our users than functioning free software that
correctly documents the provenance of the software, albeit perhaps not
down to the detail of every individual who has ever contributed a line
of code.
I have to object here. If you work with open source software, you got some
rights from the author, but you also have to fulfill some duties. One of
the duties is to comply with the license the author has choosen. Most
licenses require that you add information about the author to binary
distributions of the software. In Debian this is achieved by adding
debian/copyright to the binary package.
Our users benefit from this compilation as well. First, Debian gives them
the right to further distribute the software, even only in binary form.
But of course the users need to know under what conditions they are
allowed to do this. Second, they can check whether Debian keeps a promise,
namely point 1 of the Social Contract. Debian promises to distribute 100%
free software. If you know of any other way how to achieve this goal,
please let me know.
I expect that I could trivially find thousands of source
packages in the main archive for which such a requirement does not hold.
Ok, I challenge your word. Please file a bug for every incomplete
debian/copyright.
But that is beside the point. The point is that I don't understand the
policy basis upon which this bug is severity serious.
Ok, I hope my explanation above make things clearer now and I thank you
for packaging open source software for Debian.
Thorsten
