Re: Copyright for Autoconf stuff

[Paul Wise]

On Sat, Nov 26, 2016 at 3:51 AM, Russ Allbery wrote:

> 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.

There are various tools for this, FOSSology looks the most promising
but Kate Stewart hasn't had the chance to finish her packaging of it.

https://wiki.debian.org/CopyrightReviewTools

-- 
bye,
pabs

https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise

Re: Copyright for Autoconf stuff

[Russ Allbery]

wf...@niif.hu (Ferenc Wágner) writes:
> In #832941 Sean Whitton  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)   

Re: Copyright for Autoconf stuff

[Gianfranco Costamagna]

Hi

>(autoconf specific copyrights)

they have special exceptions to be relicensed under another license.

So, if you don't account them specifically they will fall in the common
package license.
Somebody just don't care about them (I don't think it is source of reject by
ftpmasters).

I think mentioning them is worth the effort, but probably you can avoid it, even
if it is appreciate when copyright is the most "open" wrt single files.


G.

Re: Copyright for Autoconf stuff

[Ben Finney]

wf...@niif.hu (Ferenc Wágner) writes:

> The license and the copyright of these files is pretty much the same all
> the time (some details can depend on the date).

It's part of the package maintainer's job to confirm that's the case for
this specific package, and document it in ‘debian/copyright’ so others
can verify that work.

> However, tracking this all properly in the copyright files of all
> packages using Autoconf takes a huge amount of work.

Is anyone asking you to do it for “all packages using Autoconf”? I
missed that.

You can do it for this package and let the maintainers of other packages
do the work for those.

-- 
 \ “Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but |
  `\  that of self interest backed by force.” —George Bernard Shaw |
_o__)  |
Ben Finney