Proposal: Full RFC822 specification

I propose that debian/copyright is fully in RFC822 format. I have added the following construction to a few of my packages:

X-Format-Specification: http://wiki.debian.org/Proposals/CopyrightFormat
X-Debianized-By: Morten Kjeldgaard <mok@bioxray.au.dk>
X-Debianized-Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2007 16:13:07 +0000.
X-Source-Downloaded-From: http://sourceforge.net/projects/btk/
X-Upstream-Author: Tim Robertson <kid50@users.sourceforge.net>,
    Chris Saunders <ctsa@users.sourceforge.net>

If formally adopted in the standard, the "X-" in front of each label can be dropped. One of the arguments for doing it this way, is that it is important to be able to see the author (copyright owner) of the original debianization.

I find that given a copyright template with the above lines, plus a template set of [Files:, Copyright:, License:] it becomes quite fast and easy to write the copyright file.

One might object that this makes debian/copyright less "humanly" readable. OTOH, the standardized formatting makes it feasible to make a nice "copyright browser" with beautifully formatting of the file.

Please note that the RFC822 examples above are not correctly indented in the Wiki.

-- ?MortenKjeldgaard

I propose an additional field, X-Non-Free-Autobuild, to fullfill the requirements for the use of the non-free autobuilders from release.net team. Here is for example what I use in non-free/clustalw:

X-Non-Free-Autobuild: yes
  The licence does not forbid Debian from using autobuilders to create binary
  packages.

-- CharlesPlessy

Where the upstream tarball is not versioned or no watch file is available you can use the following:

X-Source-Downloaded-From: http://www.intertwingly.net/code/venus/
X-Source-Get-Original: ./debian/rules get-orig-source
X-Source-Size: 389120
X-Source-MD5: 934d927eecfdb5a1a4a17798de3ed60f

Also, for any dependances the get-orig-source target you should use:

X-Source-Original-Depends: autoconf, automake, libtool, subversion-tools

The Copyright field should be separated by newlines and not commas as this would be troublesome to parse when the copyright details also included commas.

Good:

Files: src/js/editline/*
Copright: Copyright 1993, Simmule Turner
 Copyright 1993, Rich Salz

Bad:

Files: src/js/editline/*
Copright: Copyright 1993, Simmule Turner, Copyright 1993, Rich Salz

The Licence field can be used in isolation to supplement the main File blocks.

This provides two benefits:

An example is included below:

Files: src/js/editline/*
Copright: Copyright 1993, Simmule Turner
 Copyright 1993, Rich Salz
License: MPL-1.1 | GPL-2 | LGPL-2.1

Files: src/js/fdlibm/*
Copright: Copyright 1993, Sun Microsystems Corporation
License: MPL-1.1 | GPL-2 | LGPL-2.1

Licence: MPL-1.1
 [LICENCE TEXT]

Licence: GPL-2
 [LICENCE TEXT]

Licence: LGPL-2.1
 [LICENCE TEXT]

-- ?NoahSlater