about calligra packaging and copyright

Adrien adrien.grellier at laposte.net
Wed May 1 15:33:10 UTC 2013


Hi,

I tried to correct the lintiant warning from the calligra package, but it raised a few questions (and a long email…) :

– Copyright: I am trying to generate automatically (or quasi-automatically) the debian/copyright. 

The MySQL team work on improving the script licensecheck2dep5 (from cdbs) :
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=597861

You can find their script here : bzr clone lp:~clint-fewbar/+junk/lcheck

With their tool, I am able to generate a not-so-bad debian/copyright for calligra. I have to edit it after, but it's better than now I think. Here is the command I run from the calligra repository:
licensecheck --copyright -r . | /tmp/lcheck/licensecheck2dep5 |vim -
The script failed to recognized on some licence (mostly with LGPL), so I have to correct all the lines « License: UNKNOWN » (about 30). You can find the results here: http://adrieng.fr/~adrien/documents/copyright
It's not finished, I have to add the licences texts.

The good things it that I identify problematic licenses, for instance the file kexi/kexidb/sqlitedump/shell.c has this license :
** The author disclaims copyright to this source code.  In place of
** a legal notice, here is a blessing:
**
**    May you do good and not evil.
**    May you find forgiveness for yourself and forgive others.
**    May you share freely, never taking more than you give.

I think we may talk to upstream about it, don't we ? There is also some files without any copyright notice Should we consider them as GPL (as in COPYING) or should we report upstream to precise their status ?

For the evolution, I think license-reconcile can help us. I have not dig a lot into it, but it seems interesting.

The script help to maintain the copyright, without doubt. But the copyright is _very_ detailed.  Do you think it's a good idea to provide such copyright, or should we just keep a higher level, without so much details ?

– I am also trying to correct the lintian warnings, but some on them are beyond my knowledge for now : 
 
no-symbols-control-file package-name-doesnt-match-sonames --> I am more an admin sys than a developper, so I don't understand very much these problems. Have to retrieve my lesson from school :)
calligra-data provides fonts. Some on them are already in some big font packages, like texlive-font-extra (130MB). Should we depend on it ? Should we create a new package, only for the fonts ? I am not sur howto deal with this.

– calligra includes libraries that are in Debian. It's libwv2 (in filters/words/msword-odf/wv2/) and kdgantt, provided in experimental with KDE 4.10. How to deal with this ? As I understand, we should patch calligra to use the debian one, isn't it ?

Cheers,

Adrien



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