Bug#522827: perl: no-copyright-file and lintian autorejects

[Niko Tyni]

Hi FTP master team,

many thanks for your work on the lintian based autorejects.

I see the perl package is on the list of to-be-rejected packages
for two reasons:

perl-suid: missing-dependency-on-libc
perl: no-copyright-file

The first is an i386-only bug (#552797) that will be fixed, but the
no-copyright-file one is a bit controversial. I put the current lintian
override in place after the discussion in #522827; quoting briefly:

> On Tue, Apr 07, 2009 at 02:32:42PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> > "Brendan O'Dea" <bod at c47.org> writes:
> > > On Tue, Apr 7, 2009 at 5:45 AM, Niko Tyni <ntyni at debian.org> wrote:
> >
> > >> As revealed by lintian, shipping /usr/share/doc/perl/copyright
> > >> in perl-base and symlinking /usr/share/doc/perl-base -> perl
> > >> is a policy violation. [...]
>
> > > This was an intentional decision and I do not believe that there is
> > > actually a problem here.
>
> > I'd recommend against anyone doing the same thing in a new package, but
> > given that it already is like this, I never managed to convince myself
> > that the effort to change it was really worth it.

Please see the bug log for the full discussion.

Would you be OK with either moving the tag into the 'warning' category
or having a special case for the perl package in lintian ?

Cheers,
-- 
Niko Tyni   ntyni at debian.org