[Debian-med-packaging] About the file COPYING in r-cran-ape

[Andreas Tille]

Hi Dylan,

as I wrote in my explanatory mail about the ftpmaster response
criticising the lack of the GPL text this is a frequent issue between
CRAN maintainers and Debian.  Strictly speaking it is illegal to strip
the GPL text and the argument to "reduce the size of CRAN packages" is
pretty poor considering todays compression methods and storage sizes /
bandwidthes.  On the other hand this does not really help our users and
we somehow need to apply common sense.

IMHO the only way is to do a pretty good job in packaging R software
inside Debian that our work will be highly regarded by CRAN maintainers
and once this relation is established we should try to educate them
about this licensing problem.  Perhaps this could be done also with the
help of other distributions - I have no idea about R packages in say
Fedora.

This is definitely no issue which should be discussed at the example of
such a marginal package like r-cran-ape.  Thus I hope ftpmaster might
accept the package as is under the given circumstances.  Perhaps we
should start with a Wiki page assembling a list of affected packages
without valid licensing information.

Kind regards

       Andreas.

On Tue, May 13, 2014 at 07:18:38PM +0200, Dybian wrote:
> Hi Andreas,
> I asked to the upstream maintainer (Emmanuel Paradis in the CC list) about
> the file COPYING, he tell me that it referrer only to GPL2 text and the
> CRAN asked them to remove it in order to reduce the size of CRAN packages.
> 
> What is the best way to do this? I add manually COPYING file in debian
> source package or Emmanuel propose me to modify the header to directly say
> reference to GPL2? In the second option, the size of Debian package will be
> smaller.
> 
> Best regards,
> Dylan

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