Open Stack

On 10/22/2013 04:48 AM, Mark McLoughlin wrote:
> On Tue, 2013-10-22 at 01:55 +0800, Thomas Goirand wrote:
>> On 10/21/2013 09:28 PM, Mark McLoughlin wrote:
>>> In other words, what exactly is a list of copyright holders good for?
>>
>> At least avoid pain and reject when uploading to the Debian NEW queue...
> 
> I'm sorry, that is downstream Debian pain.

I agree, it is painful, though it is a necessary pain. Debian has always
been strict with copyright stuff. This should be seen as a freeness Q/A,
so that we make sure everything is 100% free, rather than an annoyance.

> It shouldn't be inflicted on
> upstream unless it is generally a useful thing.

There's no other ways to do things, unfortunately. How would I make sure
a software is free, and released in the correct license, if upstream
doesn't declare it properly? There's been some cases on packages I
wanted to upload, where there was just:

Classifier: License :: OSI Approved :: MIT License

in *.egg-info/PKG-INFO, and that's it. If the upstream authors don't fix
this by adding a clear LICENSE file (with the correct definition of the
MIT License, which is confusing because there's been many of them), then
the package couldn't get in. Lucky, upstream authors of that python
module fixed that, and the package was re-uploaded and validated by the
FTP masters.

I'm not saying that this was the case for Trove (the exactitude of the
copyright holder list in debian/copyright is less of an issue), though
I'm just trying to make you understand that you can't just ignore the
issue and say "I don't care, that's Debian's problem". This simply
doesn't work (unless you would prefer OpenStack package to *not* be in
Debian, which I'm sure isn't the case here).

Thomas