d/copyright - how to get 99% of your uploads to NEW pass the ftp-masters' review

Track: Packaging, policy, and Debian infrastructure

Type: BoF (45 minutes)

Room: B03-035

Time: Jul 15 (Tue): 16:30

Duration: 0:40

There are probably 1000 ways / strategies of writing and maintaining the debian/copyright (short: d/copyright) file. I want to share my personal approach of doing this which has proven to be quite successful over the past years.

This talk got inspired by feedback from one of the ftp-masters: ‘I don’t get that, why can I accept most (98-99%) of your package uploads to NEW without any complaints or comments?’. The major reason for getting REJECTs when uploading a Debian package to Debian’s NEW queue is due to a flawed or incomplete d/copyright file. Obviously, my uploads don’t show those symptoms.

Whereas the initial upload of a NEW Debian package might still be doable, assuring the correctness of a (large) package’s copyright attributions over various releases of a software possibly over years or decades is a completely different cup of team.

My approach of maintaining d/copyright embraces both: the initial upload and the long-term maintenance, and both with a high degree of accuracy.

During this BoF I demonstrate the d/copyright writing technique on an example package (send me suggestions via mail, if you like).

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