Re: [Monotone-debian] debian/copyright needs rewriting?

[Zack Weinberg]

On Thu, Feb 28, 2008 at 9:47 AM, Richard Levitte <address@hidden> wrote:
>  Graydon participating or not doesn't matter, he owns the copyright on
>  the stuff he's written until he signs over the copyright to someone
>  else (and all files are updated accordingly).

Of course.

>  I'm not sure what you mean with "lead-in", care to clarify?

The form of the copyright statement for "main files":

| I [Graydon] believe I am within my rights to assert my own copyright on:
|
|  - the files I wrote
|
|  - the collective work, including the use (though not authorship) of
|    files I copied from the public domain, and other copyrighted but
|    freely-licensed sources (and possibly lcs.cc, as discussed below)

I am not altogether comfortable turning this into the bald "Copyright
2002-2008 Graydon Hoare and contributors as listed below" or even
"Copyright 2002-2008 a cast of dozens, listed below" that law would
seem to require.  I'm more comfortable with it than I was last year
(when I audited the thing for completeness) but I still don't like
removing the hedges expressed.

>  zackw> was told that I should copy the *entire
>  zackw> text* of AUTHORS into debian/copyright.  Which is nuts and I'm
>  zackw> not doing it.
>
>  We might have to.  As I understand it, debian/copyright is supposed to
>  contain not only a copyright statement (which is basically a single
>  (C) line for each author), but also the license for the package as
>  well as for each bundled component.
>
>  The trouble is that AUTHORS doesn't contain copyright statements for
>  monotone itself, it just contains a list of authors.  It does contain
>  copyright AND license statements for most of the bundles components,
>  though.

Right.  My opinion is that we ought to be able to (in the "the world
should be this way" sense) make AUTHORS 100% comprehensive and then
just quote its first paragraph in debian/copyright with a reference to
AUTHORS (which is, after all, installed *right next to it in the same
directory*) for further details.  It was the incorporation by
reference that d-l did not like.

>  I'm starting to think that I should create a script that goes through
>  the whole versioned source and pick out every copyright statement I
>  can find, then sort on name and uniquify...

Not a bad idea.  If we're going to go to the trouble, though, we ought
to canonicalize the form of the GPL declaration and make sure it's
present in all files (except the simple ones, e.g. I don't think we
need it on every test __driver__.lua).  And I suspect there are people
who've made nontrivial contributions that don't appear in any file
header - should also check logs and signatures.

I don't think we need to worry about any of this for debian 0.39-1, by
the way.  ftp-master only does manual processing for NEW packages; as
we are in already, the form of debian/copyright must have been
acceptable enough at one time, and we can fix it at our leisure.  With
higher priority if someone files a bug, of course.

zw