[Pkg-crosswire-devel] Pushed the copyright branch

[Jonathan Marsden]

Dmitrijs Ledkovs wrote:

> I've update debian/copyright to reflect every single file in the
> distribution. 

Thanks.  BTW, there is am lp:~pkgcrossswire/libsword/copyright branch...
but it doesn't have your newest version in it, that is in
lp:~pkgcrosswire/libsword/copyrights -- the only difference being a
trailing letter 's', which is somewhat confusing :)

> I hope I got it about right.

Close, I think, but see below :)

Some things I spotted that needed edits:

(1) Daniel's family name is Glassey -- it was misspelled.

(2) include/untgz.h almost certainly has the same copyright as the
untgz.c file and so should not be treated as one of the other
bindings/other *.h files.

(3) We seem to be missing email and postal contact info for Crosswire --
I think that info should probably be in here.  To me, saying only
"Upstream-Maintainer: Members of the SWORD Project team" is a bit
unhelpful -- I don't know from that how to contact them!

(4) Upstream-Name is probably "The SWORD Project" not "The SWORD API", I
think?  Although actually I'm not really sure what the distinction
between "The SWORD Project" and "CrossWire Bible Society" is, in legal
terms.  The copyright is stated as being Crosswire, but the project
seems to often refer to itself as "The SWORD Project".  On one page
there in an address given as "The SWORD Project; P. O. Box 2528; Tempe,
AZ 85280-2528 USA" but on the web site contact page the address is

  The CrossWire Bible Society
  P. O. Box 2528
  Tempe, AZ  85280-2528

So they have the same post office box address :)

(5) The version of the format specification you use (why use 48 when 53
is out there, incidentally?) has Name:, Maintainer: and Source: fields,
but you used Upstream-Maintainer:, Upstream-Name: and Upstream-Source:
instead, which I think are from an older revision?  We need to be
consistent about that kind of thing, or the whole value of a machine
readable debian/copyright file is lost.

(6) License: needs to be spelled that way throughout, there is a typo
"Licesse:" in one place.

(7) You had a field "License: zlib/libpng" but never include a licence
called that later.  I think just "Licence: ZLIB" was intended.

> X-Remove tag for questionable files with expectation whether we can
> remove them such that it is still possible to build and run the library

I see the idea, but I think that "X-Remove: no" has no real value --
that's the default!  And "X-Remove: some" is pretty vague.  So I'd
suggest we delete those.

I also see you are tagging zlib as X-Remove: yes, even though it has a
free licence.  Does that mean you want it removed from the repacked
tarball (since we are creating one for other less free files anyway), or
that we just rm the relevant files early in debian/rules ?

> X-Comment tag for comments =D

This is fine, if that's what you are supposed to do to add comments --
it seems a rather obvious omission in the spec to *not* allow them :)

> And while we are on the topic, how are we licensing the actuall debian
> packaging????
> 
> I vote Expat license, e.g. http://www.jclark.com/xml/copying.txt
> This way anyone can adopt debian packaging for whatever needs they have.

I'd much prefer that we use a very well known licence that is already in
/usr/share/common-licenses/ in both Debian and Ubuntu, so that we do not
add to licence proliferation (and to the length of debian/copyright!).
 I also suggest that we just leave the packaging licence as it was,
which I think means GPL?  dh_make has a little template for this which says:

  The Debian packaging is:

      Copyright (C) #YEAR#, #USERNAME# <#EMAIL#>

  and is licensed under the GPL

That's simple, clear, and works for me, though I'd suggest we indicate
GPL-2+ rather than leaving it undefined which version of the GPL is
intended.

To be honest, I don't think we're doing anything so clever and unique in
our packaging that people will be desperate to copy it anyway :)

I just committed all the edits mentioned in this email to the copyrights
branch.

Jonathan