[Debichem-devel] Bug#643921: Severity of bug #643921

[Ben Hutchings]

On Fri, 2012-10-05 at 00:13 +0200, Michael Banck wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Thu, Oct 04, 2012 at 10:08:07PM +0100, Ben Hutchings wrote:
> > On Thu, Oct 04, 2012 at 10:50:56PM +0200, Michael Banck wrote:
> > > On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 02:52:32AM +0100, Ben Hutchings wrote:
> > > > On Wed, 2011-11-02 at 12:34 +0100, Michael Banck wrote:
> > > > > severity 643921 important
> > > > > thanks
> > > > 
> > > > How is a possible policy violation (and maybe copyright violation) not
> > > > serious?
> > > 
> > > As Jordan stated, the files under question are the product (redirected
> > > standard output) of non-free software, whose copyright statements are
> > > reprinted in their output as is generally customary.  I do not see that
> > > this is a policy and/or copyright violation.
> > [...]
> > 
> > I see two possibilities:
> > 
> > 1. The restrictions described by these notices do not affect the
> > DFSG-freeness of the files, and the bug can be closed now.
> > (Possibly the notices should be removed to avoid confusion.)
> > 
> > 2. These restrictions do affect the DFSG-freeness of the files,
> > and there is a serious bug to be fixed, probably by removing the
> > files.
> > 
> > Please explain why you think neither of these is the case.
> 
> I think possibility 1 is the case, but I did not close the bug
> immediately to get the opinion of others.  If you think it should be
> close I will do it.
>
> I don't think the notices should be removed, possibly programs parsing
> the output are looking for distinct strings in there, e.g. to figure out
> which version of that code produced the output (which might have changed
> between versions in non-obvious ways).

Now I understand that the samples are the stdout/stderr logs from other
programs and not any conventional kind of file format.  Given that, it
seems perfectly clear that these texts should be understood  to refer to
those programs and not these files.  I agree that the notices should not
be removed.

In case of further over-eager searches for copyright notices, it might
be worth commenting on this in debian/copyright.  But I think you can
close the bug whether or not you do that.

Ben.

-- 
Ben Hutchings
For every complex problem
there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
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