Bug#1131015: mention Files-Excluded/Included-* in copyright-format-1.0.xml

Simon Josefsson <[email protected]> Tue, 17 Mar 2026 14:31:30 +0100

Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.policy
Message-ID	<87ikaupop9.fsf__33220.0060294539$1773754419$gmane$org@josefsson.org>

Bill Allombert <[email protected]> writes:

>> Although what do you mean packaging tools shouldn't require the use of
>> copyright-format?  There is no requirement here, everything is opt-in.
>> The patch document these to be optional fields, for those who want to
>> use them as they are supported by uscan and mk-origtargz.
>
> Getting uscan to call mk-origtargz to remove files requires using the new
> copyright-format. Otherwise the maintainer need to call mk-origtargz
> manually. We should do better.

I'm not sure I follow here.  How?  From a design point of view, having a
Files Excluded/Included wildcard list seems like a reasonable approach.
And people will need to opt-in to use some mechanism, or do things
manually.

Is your concern that the existing fields hi-jack the debian/copyright
file, when those fields could have been put in a different file?

Or is there anything deeper about the design that you think could be
improved?

If I would start from scratch to solve this problem, I can't come up
with anything to improve.  The tooling could be improved a lot to be
more user friendly and better support iterative re-imports, but the
specification part seems fairly good.

In my experience, the only reason for using the Files-* headers is to
avoid non-DFSG files, or to simplify the upstream package to make the
burden to document the license of 1000+ completely irrelevant files in
debian/copyright.  Thus, putting the headers in debian/copyright feels
entirely appropriate to me, so I'm not sure I see the argument for a
different file either.

/Simon

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