On 2026/05/29 20:12, Antonio Terceiro wrote:
I guess that when taking advantage of that by shrinking
debian/copyright files to only reference some of those texts,
that we should then declare a versioned dependency on
base-files >= 14.1, right?
While we can and probably should remove license text in favor of the
licenses included in base-files, I would say that introducing such
versioned dependency (or tracking it the future to eventually remove) is
not useful use of developer time. There is no functional dependency
between the packages, it's only "look over there for the full text",
inside free-form text. No upgrade will ever require that dependency to
work properly.
As long as the upload that makes this reference comes after base-files
actually contains the license, I would advocate us to *not* recommend
such versioned dependency, or even to advise against it.
I agree with everything said in this thread so far. It strictly speaking
seems like a "right" way to do it, but on the other hand it also seems
like an unnecessary constraint, and another thing to keep in mind when
backporting.
As an aside, would it be possible to add these license texts to stable
(base files version 13) as well? Then at least anyone with an up to date
stable or newer will have those files.
-Jonathan
