John Scott wrote... > On Saturday, January 2, 2021 10:30:56 AM EST Matthew Vernon wrote: > > I have noticed some packages using the newer machine-readable copyright > > format, but not specifying any copyright for debian/* > That's not good practice. You should ask the package maintainer to include > such information in debian/copyright. They would know the history best. Be > sure to check for a wildcard though, like > Files: * > as that could apply to debian/.
That was in the upgrading checklist for policy 3.9.3 (2012):
| 12.5
| ``debian/copyright`` is no longer required to list the Debian
| maintainers involved in the creation of the package (although note
| that the requirement to list copyright information is unchanged).
Which made me believe it was not mandatory to have an extra stanza for
debian/* and the things the maintainer(s) did there. But possibly that's
just a misunderstanding.
> > What does that mean about the copyright status of debian/* ? If I want
> > to re-use a file therein in another package, can I do so?
> If the copyright file doesn't specify the license, and there are no comments
> in
> the files specifying the license, then the maintainer of that package really
> should fix that. That leaves the license ambiguous and you may not make any
> assumptions about your use of the file.
About the license, the matching entry applies, so it's upstream's.
Actually I prefer to use the same license as upstream, this just avoids
trouble if someone considers a particular combination a problem.
About copyright - in the very general I doubt there's much copyrightable
stuff in debian/*. And if you really want to go pedantic, you could ask
about patches (half-upstream, half-contributor [not necessarily
maintainer]). Hopefully nobody will try to do the full discussion here.
Christoph
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