Jongmin Kim <jm...@pukyong.ac.kr> writes: > Hi! > > I'm new to packaging, and I am currently trying to write 'd/copyright' > file. I am watching some other repositories for studying the > conventions. > > I can see that some packages have an upstream author's URL in their > 'Copyright:', like 'Copyright: https://github.com/authorname'. > Even though the upstream source has their explicit copyright > information--like 'year name'-- in copyright file--like 'LICENSE.txt'.
That is IMO not a valid copyright statement. So it doesn't belong in the “Copyright” field. There is already an appropriate field, “Source”, where the URL for the upstream source can be declared. > Now I have some questions: > - Is it a one of the conventions? Can I write like that? The “Machine-readable debian/copyright file” specification allows free-form text in the “Copyright” field. With that said, in my opinion you should strongly prefer the canonical form for each copyright statement: Copyright © MMMM–NNNN ENTITYNAME <CONTACTEMAIL> with “MMMM–NNNN” being the range of years the work was published; “ENTITYNAME” the legal name for the entity that holds copyright in the work; “CONTACTEMAIL” the contact email address, if known, for that entity. Various accommodations need to be made for different circumstances (e.g. often a work has copyright held by a number of legal entities, so “ENTITYNAME and others” might be appropriate). > - Why use only the author's URL instead of the author's copyright > information like 'Copyright: year name <email>'? There are no circumstances IMO where it's appropriate to replace any of that information with a GitHub URL. > - Is there a d/copyright guideline to read? Yes, install the ‘debian-copyright’ package and you will have the current specification installed. It is a document in plain text and HTML, ‘/usr/share/doc/debian-policy/copyright-format-1.0’. > This might be a silly question, of newcomer (= me). It's not a silly question. Thank you for working to get this right! -- \ “One of the most important things you learn from the internet | `\ is that there is no ‘them’ out there. It's just an awful lot of | _o__) ‘us’.” —Douglas Adams | Ben Finney