Alex <[email protected]> writes: > Sorry, I haven't referenced my [post to debian-devel][1] for context, in > a response to which Ben pointed me to this bug.
> [1]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2026/05/msg00168.html > In short: I think - maybe wrongly - that we inadvertantly do make claims > about the licensing information of license files with stanzas like > File: * > Copyright: Some Author <[email protected]> > License: GPL3 > whereby the GPL-3.0 license itself is included in the package as > LICENSE, for example. I understand, but that's just not how * has ever been interpreted. I do see the argument for spelling that out explicitly, and we should probably do that. But people should not, IMO, change their behavior in how they write debian/copyright files. It would be a lot of churn for no real improvement. We should just say that "File: *" doesn't make any claims about license texts themselves. > Me neither. I think it would be good to make this exception explicit in > the policy but also carve out some handling in d/copyright, or at least > not "force" per-package Lintian overrides onto maintainers for this > specific exception handling. If Lintian is saying that you should describe the licensing information of the license texts themselves, I agree this is a bug. I believe you should ignore them completely when writing debian/copyright files (except, of course, as source material for understanding the licenses of *other* files). > They are simply statements about copyright, not new licenses. > Non-copyrightability of these files is another argument why I think > there should be no expectation (e.g. via Lintian) to have to assign them > any copyright information in the first place. I admit to being a little confused about why you are having issues with Lintian that I've never seen, but perhaps it was a recent change? I would just use a File: * stanza with the general package license and let it cover such files and not give it a second thought. It is not worth your time and energy, or the time and energy of someone reading debian/copyright, to worry about whether those files are copyrightable or not. -- Russ Allbery ([email protected]) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
