On ma, 2011-01-17 at 21:11 -0800, Russ Allbery wrote: > Ben Finney <[email protected]> writes: > > Charles Plessy <[email protected]> writes: > > >> I am worried that there was a misundertanding about the purpose of the > >> first paragraph's Copyright field: from my reading of the current > >> version of the DEP (and independantly of how my opinion on how it > >> should be) > > > The explanation in the DEP doesn't really make it clear why this is > > needed, as opposed to an initial “Files: *” paragraph with the “package > > as a whole” copyright and license values. > > > Where is the rationale for having Copyright apply in the header? > > We talked about this several times, I think. We should probably capture > the rationale in the standard since it keeps coming up again. > > Files: * implies that each individual file is covered by that copyright > and license. The intent of putting Copyright and License in the top > header was to specify the copyright and license for the collective > distribution, separate from the copyright and license for any individual > file. > > I'm not sure how License fell out of that. It was always supposed to > include both, I think. Having Copyright without License isn't horribly > useful. > > I was one of the people who specifically requested this, since one of the > purposes to which I want to put DEP-5 requires some way of specifying the > collective copyright and license for a package as a whole, regardless of > the individual licenses of some files. This is not the same thing as a > Files: * block that's overridden by more specific Files: blocks.
There seems to be consensus to add an optional License field to the first paragraph. Anyone want to make a patch, and perhaps include some version of Russ's explanation above as rationale, so that we don't get endless questions about this in the future? -- Blog/wiki/website hosting with ikiwiki (free for free software): http://www.branchable.com/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
