[Debian-med-packaging] [bedtools] 01/01: Restore the License field in the header: Lintian is wrong.

[Charles Plessy]

Hi Andreas,

the License field in the copyright field is defined as follows.

    In the header paragraph, this field gives the license information for the
    package as a whole, which may be different or simplified from a combination of
    all the per-file license information. 

https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/#license-field

In some of the packages I maintain, I inspected the binary dependancy chain and
summarised the result in this field.  Note that the debian/copyright file is
also part of the binary packages.  My goal was to verify that there is no
incompatible licenses at run time.  Here is the example for bedtools.

    License: GPL-2 and MIT and GPL-3+ with runtime exception and zlib
     BEDTools combines source code under GPL-2, LGPL-2.1 and MIT licenses, and
     links to libc6, libgcc, libstdc++ and zlib1g.

The format of the first line is defined as follows:

    An abbreviated name for the license, or expression giving alternatives (see
    the Short name section for a list of standard abbreviations).  If there are
    licenses present in the package without a standard short name, an arbitrary
    short name may be assigned for these licenses. These arbitrary names are only
    guaranteed to be unique within a single copyright file.

The presence of things like "GPL-3+ with runtime exception" is not explicitely
mentionned above, but is obviously allowed given the line that follows.

    If there are no remaining lines, then all of the short names or short names
    followed by license exceptions making up the first line must be described in
    stand-alone License paragraphs. 

If Lintian issued a tag dep5-file-paragraph-reference-header-paragraph, then
it is a false positive that will be fixed in the next release of Lintian.
(See https://bugs.debian.org/769818#87 and the answer marking it pending).

Cheers,

-- 
Charles