Bug#929694: cme update dpkg-copyright removes manually added copyright entries

[Dominique Dumont]

On Wed, 29 May 2019 10:36:27 +0500 Pirate Praveen <praveen at onenetbeyond.org> 
wrote:
> justification: it should not remove any existing copyright noticed 
> added by maintainer.

Then what's the point of running "cme update dpkg-copyright" ?

Let's see what's going on:

node-gulp$ licensecheck -r make-iterator --copyright -m
make-iterator/LICENSE   MIT/X11 (BSD like)      2014-2018 Jon Schlinkert.
make-iterator/README.md UNKNOWN 2012-2013 moutjs team and contributors 
(http:moutjs.com)
make-iterator/index.js  UNKNOWN 2014-2018 Jon Schlinkert.
make-iterator/package.json      UNKNOWN *No copyright*

First problem: LICENSE and README.md do not contain the same copyright
owners. By reading the README.md file, I saw that make-iterator is
derived from moutjs. Hence debian/copyright entry is accurate.

But how can cme decide if the discrepancy is due to upstream change or
upstream inconsistencies ? It cannot.

license-reconcile choose to throw an error in this case. cme trusts
upstream files.

To avoid update debian/copyright with wrong entries, you should
override wrong copyright information in
debian/fill.copyright.blanks.yml as described in
Dpkg::Copyright::Scanner man page.

Note that fill.copyright.blanks can be edited with "cme edit dpkg"


That said, tests done with node-gulp has shown that the way cme
extracts information from LICENSE and README file is not ideal. I'm
going to improve its behaviour.

All the best.