wf...@niif.hu (Ferenc Wágner) writes: > In #832941 Sean Whitton <spwhit...@spwhitton.name> writes:
>> 6. config.guess, config.sub, configure, configure.in, Makefile.in and >> install-sh are not accounted for in d/copyright. > The license and the copyright of these files is pretty much the same all > the time (some details can depend on the date). However, tracking this > all properly in the copyright files of all packages using Autoconf takes > a huge amount of work. Is there really no way to redirect all that > effort towards something productive? For example by declaring at a > central place that these files have the usual license and copyright > unless specified otherwise in debian/copyright, and be done with them? It's very widespread practice in the archive to not bother documenting the copyright and license of the build system files that come from Autoconf and Automake. I'm sure people have various opinions about the merits of that, but as long as nothing weird is happening here (upstream adding code to those files under some weird license), I really doubt that ftp-master will care, which is the metric that matters the most. The licenses are very well-understood and don't pose any interesting issues. Package sponsors can of course have their own policies, but I'd upload packages without that documentation, since I think it's a fair amount of effort for very little gain. (I have stanzas for those files in some, although not all, of my packages, but only because I have a half-assed script that semi-automates it, although not horribly well.) For those who think it's important to document the licenses of these files, I would encourage you to work on writing a well-tested and reliable tool to automatically generate those stanzas (the notices are fairly consistent and open for that sort of automation) rather than asking people to do tedious and not very productive manual work. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
