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

[Charles Plessy]

Le Wed, Jul 08, 2015 at 11:08:00AM +0200, Andreas Tille a écrit :
> On Wed, Jul 08, 2015 at 04:18:26PM +0900, Charles Plessy wrote:
> > The presence of things like "GPL-3+ with runtime exception" is not explicitely
>                                      ^    ^       ^
> Short names may not contain blanks - that's IMHO the issue linitan is
> correctly claiming.

Hi Andreas,

The machine-readable copyright format specification states:

    An exception or clarification to a license is signalled in plain text, by
    appending with keywords exception to the short name. 

http://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/

Here is an example given in the specification, with the GPL and the OpenSSL
exception.

    A GPL-2+ work with the OpenSSL exception is in effect a dual-licensed work that
    can be redistributed either under the GPL-2+, or under the GPL-2+ with the
    OpenSSL exception. It is thus expressed as GPL-2+ with OpenSSL exception. A
    possible License field for such a license is:
    
    License: GPL-2+ with OpenSSL exception
     This program is free software; you can redistribute it
     and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public
     License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either
     version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later
     version.
     (...)

In retrospect, I think that this syntax is overly complicated.  We should have
used ad-hoc short names.  But note that SPDX (a specification for
machine-readable copyright and license declarations), which was using ad-hoc
short names in its version 1.0, introduced license exceptions in its version
2.0.  So there is definitely a demand for it...

http://spdx.org/licenses/exceptions-index.html

Cheers,

-- 
Charles