[Pkg-gridengine-devel] gridengine copyright situation appears feasible

[Dave Love]

Sorry for the very late response.

Afif Elghraoui <afif at ghraoui.name> writes:

> Hello,
> I looked into the copyright for gridengine and it looks like it will be
> a giant pain to revamp debian/copyright-- but I'm willing to do it. All
> the information seems to be there in the source distribution and I just
> need to compile it all into the debian/copyright file.

The information isn't all there.  That's the fundamental problem.  There
are known contributors of material that's significant for copyright that
aren't recorded (just like for many other packages, I'm sure).

> Does that change anything for you, Dave? I've imported your latest work
> (8.1.8 packaging from your tarball--the darcs/git repo isn't up-to-date)
> into my packaging repository fork and I'm building from there dealing
> with copyright, lintian, and whatnot.

Thanks for the interest, but it's all a bit academic without a Debian
developer as a maintainer.  There's no point in putting effort into the
packaging just to satisfy Debian, and there's very little real interest
in free gridengine to make general maintenance worthwhile.  (Last time I
checked, I thought any lintian warnings were ignorable, but that was
long ago.)

What repo is out-of-date with what, exactly?
http://arc.liv.ac.uk/repos/git/gridengine.debian/ seems to be mirroring
the darcs version correctly, but I realize there were patches that
hadn't been pushed to it.  I've just pushed them, and they'll be
mirrored shortly.

> I appreciate all the work you've put into this over the years. I can
> imagine how annoying it is to try to keep up with Debian policy
> compliance when it wasn't your main focus for SGE.

The problem I have with the policy is that it's applied inconsistently.
I modelled what I did after the Linux packaging (after fixing a number
of problems with the copyright log in the existing gridengine
packaging), and it wasn't acceptable.