Bastien ROUCARIES <roucaries.bast...@gmail.com> writes: > Yes one question do I need to document aclocal.m4 copyright patchwork ?
My take on this (but note that I'm not an ftpmaster): The debian/copyright file serves two separate purposes. First, it's included in binary packages to provide our mandatory license and copyright statements to comply with licenses and to communicate to users the licensing of the work. Second, it's used by the ftpmaster team to review the package licensing and ensure that it's okay for Debian to distribute it. For aclocal.m4 and other build system files, the binary packages are not normally (there are some special cases) a derivative work of those files, and therefore their licensing has no impact on the binary package. There's therefore no need to document their licensing for the first purpose, since the binary package is independent of them. Their licensing may have to be documented for legal reasons in the source package, but for legal compliance in the source package, the notices at the top of the files are generally sufficient. And, more generally, upstream is presumably already complying with the necessary license restrictions for the source package and we therefore comply by redistributing the source package verbatim (at least verbatim from the perspective of those notices). So, the remaining reason why one might document this is for the ftpmaster review. However, 99% of aclocal.m4 files (and configure, and Makefile.in, and so forth) in packages using Autotools have the same, boring license which is known to be free and which doesn't require any review. So while it's okay to document it (I do for my packages), it really isn't necessary for the ftpmaster review and I think it can be safely omitted. *However*, if aclocal.m4 *isn't* under the customary license and does have some sort of unusual provision, then you should document it for the ftpmaster review. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/87ty3ucizv....@windlord.stanford.edu