GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 726619
Should distribute Copying with tarball
Last modified: 2014-03-26 13:37:46 UTC
Including the full text of the licence is important, so it should be distributed with the tarball. It would also be better to use the standard name COPYING. AUTHORS should be treated similarly.
Created attachment 272261 [details] [review] rename and distribute COPYING and AUTHORS
Can you explain the difference between this and what I am currently doing? afaik the COPYING and AUTHORS files are being included in the tarballs and the files you are providing are identical to the ones that are being included. What am I not understanding?
Of course! The files are indeed identical, the patch is just to rename them to the ALLCAPS variant. automake automatically distributes several files, including README, NEWS and so on. However, the files have to be named exactly as automake expects if they are to be distributed. "Copying" and "Authors" are not the capitalization that automake expects, and are therefore not distributed in the gnome-sound-recorder tarballs. You can verify this by checking the tarball at https://download.gnome.org/sources/gnome-sound-recorder/3.11/gnome-sound-recorder-3.11.91.1.tar.xz (for example); there is neither a "Copying" nor a "COPYING". The reason that I discovered this is that I submitted a Fedora package review request for gnome-sound-recorder, as I was surprised that it was not already included: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1077810 Having a licence that is not inside the tarball makes this a bit complicated. My longer-term suggestion would be to drop the "foreign" argument to automake (in configure.ac), which then requires AUTHORS and COPYING to be present. However, this also requires a ChangeLog. Most projects generate that file at distribution time, and have a dummy file in the tree. Although a separate topic, but I would be happy to write a Makefile target to do that.
I see, thanks for explaining. I assume it's too late to do this for 3.12, is that correct?
A release was scheduled for this past Monday (17th, 3.11.92), which would be the start of hard code freeze. In my opinion, this would classify as a bugfix, but you can ask release-team@gnome.org for an exception (and possibly to allow a late release to get in for 3.11.92) and I am sure it would be fine. You can see a bit more information about what might break the freeze, and how to request an exception at: https://wiki.gnome.org/ReleasePlanning/RequestingFreezeBreaks
Thanks, I need to request a late release anyway because the hardware issues I had with wacom prevented me from releasing 3.11.92 on time. I'll ask the release team.
The files are in the tarballs now, thanks!