Re: How to properly handle contradicting licenses in a single file (aclocal.m4)

Hi,

On Wed, Jun 03, 2026 at 02:56:40PM +0200, Bastian Blank wrote:
>On Wed, Jun 03, 2026 at 02:46:52PM +0200, Marc Haber wrote:
>> Who is the upstream of aclocal.m4? Do I REALLY have to talk to people who
>> contributed two lines of code to GNU autotools three decades ago to maintain
>> a simple package in Debianß
>
>No-one, because it is a generated file.  So if you care, you provide
>sources without all those files, which are already rebuilt by
>dh_autoreconf anyway.  This then also plugs the xz shaped hole.

If that is so, why do we still tell our people to pull the upstream 
tarball and that it is important to have the upstream source verbatim in 
Debian?

>> This all doesn't help. We need definitive guidelines that package
>> maintainers can adhere to. Maintaining debian/copyright already takes more
>> time than maintaining the actual package, it is impossible to do right, and
>> frankly, I ask myself why I am still maintaining packages for Debian EVERY
>> time I open up an editor in debian/copyright.
>
>The complete current concept of debian/copyright is not useful.  Someone
>who looks at binary packages cares about what the accumulative licenses
>of this are.  They don't need another copy of the source information.

I strongly feel that we are being once more holier than the pope in this 
matter.

Greetings
Marc