Bug#721670: libconfig-model-dpkg-perl: "cme fix dpkg-copyright" may cause data loss if there are two Copyright fields in one paragraph

[Axel Beckert]

Package: libconfig-model-dpkg-perl
Severity: grave
Version: 2.038
Justification: may cause data loss

Hi,

I had a package (libbenchmark-timer-perl) with the following paragraph
in debian/copyright:

Files: *
Copyright: (c) 2000-2001 Andrew Ho
Copyright: (c) 2004 David Coppit
 The original code (written before April 20, 2001) was written by Andrew Ho
  <andrew at zeuscat.com>, and is copyright (c) 2000-2001 Andrew Ho. […]

"cme fix dpkg-copyright" modified that paragraph as follows:

 Files: *
-Copyright: (c) 2000-2001 Andrew Ho
 Copyright: (c) 2004 David Coppit
  The original code (written before April 20, 2001) was written by Andrew Ho
  <andrew at zeuscat.com>, and is copyright (c) 2000-2001 Andrew Ho. Versions up to

i.e. it removed one of the (errornously) two Copyright fields.

IMHO the only sane way to automatically handle such cases is to
concatenate, i.e. merge the values of these two fields:

 Files: *
 Copyright: (c) 2000-2001 Andrew Ho
-Copyright: (c) 2004 David Coppit
+           (c) 2004 David Coppit
  The original code (written before April 20, 2001) was written by Andrew Ho
  <andrew at zeuscat.com>, and is copyright (c) 2000-2001 Andrew Ho. Versions up to
  0.5 are distributed under the same terms as Perl.

Final and manually fixed and improved commit was http://deb.li/3aP7A

Please check if this may also happen for other multiple field
occurrences in one paragraph. But in any case, the data loss in the
Copyright field is probably the worst which can happen.

(And yes, this happened before 2.039 was uploaded.)

		Regards, Axel
-- 
 ,''`.  |  Axel Beckert <abe at debian.org>, http://people.debian.org/~abe/
: :' :  |  Debian Developer, ftp.ch.debian.org Admin
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