[Debian-pan-maintainers] mrcfile testsuite datasets license?

[Colin Palmer - STFC UKRI]

Hi Roland,

Thanks for pointing out that the licence for some of the test datasets is not clear. I will update the readme file.

I'm not familiar with the Debian guidelines - are the files from EMDB acceptable as they are, or do you need more specific information about their licensing?

The other test files were contributed by people who agreed for me to share them publicly. There was no specific discussion of licensing, but since the files were contributed to a BSD-licensed project I've assumed that they implicitly agreed for the files to be distributed under the same licence as the code.

Most of the tests for mrcfile do not need any test data files, so if it's not possible to resolve the licensing situation to Debian's satisfaction, I could add a switch to allow a subset of the tests to be run without the test datasets present.

Best wishes,
Colin


-----Original Message-----
From: Roland Mas <lolando at debian.org> 
Sent: 20 September 2022 13:57
To: Palmer, Colin (STFC,RAL,SC) <colin.palmer at stfc.ac.uk>
Cc: debian-pan-maintainers at alioth-lists.debian.net
Subject: mrcfile testsuite datasets license?

Hello,

I'm Roland Mas, a Debian developer and freelance consultant. I'm tasked by Synchrotron SOLEIL with packaging mrcfile for Debian. Part of that job is ensuring that mrcfile complies with the Debian free software guidelines (DFSG).

 From what I can see, the code of mrcfile itself is fine (the BSD-3-clause license is quite okay), that's a good start.

However, the testsuite includes a few datasets for testing the code itself, and the license for these datasets is not quite clear. 
mrcfile/tests/test_data/README.txt credits the source of two of the datasets to EMDB; the "policies" page on the EMDB website states that the submitter of datasets must ensure that the authors "Agree to public distribution of all entry data without restriction", but I can't find a trace of the actual licensing of the datasets when distributed by EMDB.

As for the mrcfile/tests/test_data/*.mrc* files, I can't find any licensing information at all.

Could you point me at licensing information that I could rely on to be able to include mrcfile as is into Debian? I could of course remove the datasets from the package that I push to Debian, but then I couldn't automatically run the testsuite, and that would be a pity (even though it probably wouldn't impact the functionality of the package).

Thanks in advance for any pointers or information,

(And thanks for mrcfile, even though it's far from my field of expertise :-)

Roland Mas.


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