Bug#828218: libsoftware-license-perl in Debian has become fork of upstream code

[Dominique Dumont]

[cc'ed debian-perl team]

Hello Vasudev

Sorry for the late reply. I did not notice this bug until now.

On Sun, 26 Jun 2016 14:04:31 +0530 Vasudev Kamath <vasudev at copyninja.info> 
wrote:
> Just to give background for this bug report. I'm helping Jonas
> Smedegaard who has adopted licensecheck tool from devscript and
> creating a new library called App::LicenseCheck ¹. We intend this tool
> to be useful cross distro and not only Debian. 

Which is a good thing.

> During the development
> we noticed that libsoftware-license-perl has diverged too much from
> upstream source.

What problem led you to this opinion ?

> This library is patched not to adopt to Debian environment but to
> change its behavior to suite Debian better.

I somewhat disagree. The fundamental behavior has not changed. Some features 
are added because debian handles license somewhat diffrently:
- usage of summary to point to /usr/share/common/licenses
- usage of code word (like GPL-2+) when user is given a choice of license 
version
- usage of Expat keyword instead of MIT license

You're free not to use debian specific parts.

The only non-debian specific feature is the short-name-fallback patch [1] for 
which there an upstream pull-request  [2]. You're welcome to voice your 
opinion there to help RJBS decide whether to merge it or not.

> This means the package
> effectively has become a fork of original upstream code.

Technically, this is not a fork, since these functionalities are provided as 
patches applied on top of upstream License::Check.

> I'm filing bug with severity important because this will cause
> interoperability problem. As an example if App::LicenseCheck is use
> din other distro it might not work as expected because it was coded
> using libsoftware-license-perl in Debian which is not same as the
> original upstream. (just an example).

Which would mean either:
- you're using a Debian specific part outside of Debian. It may be a bug on 
your side, or you've found a valid use case outside of Debian for the Debian 
specific parts. In the latter case, we can try to push some patches upstream 
- you've found a bug where the fundamental behavior of Debian's 
Software::License is changed. Then please give me details so I can reproduce 
the problem.

All the best

[1] https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/pkg-perl/packages/libsoftware-license-perl.git/tree/debian/patches/short-name-fallback
[2] https://github.com/Perl-Toolchain-Gang/Software-License/pull/44
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