Russ Allbery <r...@debian.org> writes: > I'll be open about this: I think that there's a deep mismatch between > how we like to discuss things, which is why I'm trying to avoid getting > into a back and forth. I think you're just trying to be clear and > precise, but I find the close textual reading that you're doing in this > discussion demoralizing and off-putting.
...which should have been my cue to just sleep on it. Ben, I'm sorry, I now understand what happened, I think. I was way too tired last night and couldn't figure out what you were getting at, and then got frustrated. I believe you thought I was arguing that copying the contents of NOTICE into debian/copyright *wasn't* allowed by the license for some reason. That had never occurred to me; I was assuming as a given that of course that was fine with the license. So I got really confused about why you were debating what the license said. Then, in trying to figure out why you were talking about the specific wording of the license, I ended up thinking you were arguing that any normal construction of debian/copyright would naturally include all the information that upstream would put in a NOTICE file, even if the maintainer never looked at the NOTICE file. (In my defense, I've seen a fair number of Apache 2.0 packages where the NOTICE file was just a copy of the license grant paraagraph, so if one only saw such packages, it wouldn't be an outlandish assumption.) So I started arguing about that, which wasn't what you meant at all. Anyway, just to try to finally clear up this misunderstanding, I completely agree with you that putting the contents of NOTICE in debian/copyright complies with the Apache 2.0 license. My argument is only that that's fragile and more effort to maintain, not that it's not allowed. I personally want the Lintian tag because I don't trust myself to remember to check for NOTICE files, particularly if upstream introduces one in a later release after the first packaging, and don't trust myself to remember to update a copy of it. I have no opinion about its severity or certainty, given that there is an alternate way of satisfying the license that would trigger the tag. I'm very sorry for having gotten irritated with you over a misunderstanding. I really need to not reply to email I'm puzzled by at the tail end of a long week without enough sleep. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
