Bug#883731: audacious: Debian packaging has incorrect license

[Ian Jackson]

Nicholas D Steeves writes ("Re: Bug#883731: audacious: Debian packaging has incorrect license"):
> Will I also need to provide formal copies in debian/COPYING.emails or
> would a README.copyright or similar pointing to the bug report
> suffice?  In particular I'm concerned about lines like this from
> d/copyright:

Please put all the necessary information in the source package.

COPYING.emails is only one filename you might choose to use.  If you
want to download multiple pages, or something, you can put them in
separate files.  It's probably a good idea to download them with w3m
-dump or something.  That produces a human-readable file which doesn't
depend on any external HTML assets.

This is much better than simply urls, because (sadly), urls often rot.
The lifetime of the contents in debian/ is controlled by Debian and
often exceeds, by large factors, the lifetime of upstream source
repositories, bug trackers, etc.

It would be a best praqctice to record the contents _and also_ the url
you got it from, and the date you downloaded it.  That way the
information you give is verifiable while the url is still active; and
if the url rots, the information (attribution, etc.) is not lost.

So in summary, I would 
  w3m -dump https://bugtracker/whatever > debian/COPYING.issue4391.txt
and make an overview file (COPYING.emails maybe) referring to
these other files.

Thanks,
Ian.