On Sun, May 17, 2026 at 03:37:17PM +0100, Richard Lewis wrote:
On the other hand, "reuse-tool" does not recognize "d/copyright" as
a license file, so it warns if there is no license for that
file. Therefore, "spdx2debian" currently generates a license file
for it using "CC0-1.0" as license and "None" as copyright holder. It
is also a workaround.

The file d/copyright can't be licensed under CC0-1.0.

Reason:
The freedoms granted by CC0-1.0 can't be applied.
CC0-1.0 grants the freedom to use, understand, distribute, and modify
the source code. However, it is precisely this last freedom that is
absent from most licenses.

why do we think the file d/copyright is itself a license?

it is documentation of how to map between files and licenses. surely
d/copyright should be under the same license as anything else in the
debian directory? (Is is because it quotes text from the GPL? but a
quote is just a quote, and should be 'fair use' to include in a
non-GPL-licenses file, right?)

Evidently, the tool that is being discussed uses practices that aren't
used in normal Debian packaging, such as not having Files: * and trying to list license/copyright info for individual files, thus not being able to use Files: * or Files: debian to cover d/copyright implicitly.

--
WBR, wRAR

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