On Tue, 12 Dec 2017 at 23:54:01 -0800, Steve Langasek wrote: > On Thu, Nov 30, 2017 at 09:27:30AM +0000, Simon McVittie wrote: > > I think the License-Grant field is a useful addition to the format > > I strongly disagree with this. I think this adds more syntax without adding > any more information.
I do see your point, but the current use of License doesn't seem suitable for what I had understood the unwritten rules to be. I hope you were right about this and I was wrong, because if that's the case, then the requirements for d/copyright are less onerous than I'd understood them to be. > The License: field is already very consistently used to contain whatever > details of the license are required to be shipped with the package - either > a full text of a license, or a license grant with a pointer to > /usr/share/common-licenses It had not been my understanding that it was that consistent. I hope I was wrong. If I'm understanding the rules correctly, there are two problem areas: As far as I'm aware, we're required to include both the license grant and the full license text in d/copyright, even in the "uncommon license" case (see the uses of CC-BY-SA-3.0-Unported, CC-BY-3.0-US, CC-BY-SA-3.0-US, CC-BY-SA-2.0-IT[1] in adwaita-icon-theme), which means we have to introduce some sort of ad-hoc divider within the License to separate the license grant from the license. Similarly, in the case where there is more than one form of words for the license grant used within a project (for instance when one author uses the FSF's recommended GPL-2 license grant, and another has just said "License: GPLv2", as in src:openarena-data), my understanding was that we're meant to copy all of them, word-for-word, into d/copyright. Having said that, it would seem absurd to have a requirement to quote all license grants when they only differ trivially (e.g. different replacements for "This program" in the GPL license grant for files copied from different projects), and src:openjk was accepted through NEW despite its copyright file avoiding that and specifically saying so, so I clearly don't fully understand what the unwritten policy is here. I don't fully understand why we're doing this or what goal(s) we're trying to achieve by doing so, and as far as I know the rationale isn't written down anywhere, so I'm just trying to follow the unwritten rules - if I've misunderstood the rules, I would be delighted to be able to reduce the amount of boilerplate I copy around. If we had some clarification from the ftp team that the license grant is only required to be copied into d/copyright if the license requires it (I don't think any do) or when referencing a common license, that would negate the first concern. Similarly, if the ftp team consider the "main" license grant from a (package,license) pair to be sufficient, or if the ftp team consider the FSF's recommended form of words to be a better thing to put in d/copyright than whatever ad-hoc informal license grant an upstream might have chosen to use, then that negates my second concern. See also <https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=883950> which attempts to clarify whether/when/why a license grant is required. The closest we have to a formal policy right now, as far as I'm aware, are <https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2006/03/msg00023.html>, and the rows "License III" and "Wrong license pointer" in <https://ftp-master.debian.org/REJECT-FAQ.html>. Is there a more recent or more canonical policy statement from the ftp team that I've missed? The ambiguity of what the rules are is amplified by the fact that violations of those rules are treated as RC or worse-than-RC (rejection); so there is considerable incentive for maintainers to assume the worst, and do a lot of tedious busy-work that might not actually be required, in the hope that it will be enough to avoid package removals and delays. I hope that the result of Policy bugs like this one can be to make the ftp team's job easier by making the copyright files that they review shorter and more straightforward. Thanks, smcv [1] I'm aware that CC-BY-SA-2.0-IT is probably not considered a Free license; it's part of a triple-license (!) on a file from Wikimedia Commons. If I understand the unwritten rules correctly, we're required to copy the entire dual- or (in this case) triple-license into d/copyright, even the options that we would never choose to use because they are non-Free. I hope someone will tell me I was wrong about this.
