Referring to upstream copyright statement from debian/copy..

I have a closely related question to the one posed in the thread
started at http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2007/11/msg00214.html

My package has a fairly complicated constellation of copyright holders
and licenses, and upstream has been helpful and provided a
comprehensive statement in their AUTHORS file, which I install into
/usr/share/doc/$package. Is it acceptable for debian/copyright to say
simply

This package was debianized by (former maintainers, me).

The source distribution was downloaded from (URL).
Upstream authors are reachable at (email address).
Copyright holders are listed in /usr/share/doc/$package/AUTHORS.gz

$package, as a whole, is available under the terms of the GNU General
Public License (version 2, or at your option, any later version).
[full GPL boilerplate here]

On Debian systems, the complete text of the GNU General
Public License can be found in `/usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-2'.

$package includes substantial bodies of code developed by
others and available under terms more permissive than the GPL.
See /usr/share/doc/$package/AUTHORS.gz for complete statements of
authorship, copyrights, and licensing.

or should I be pasting the entire text of AUTHORS into
debian/copyright? If so, does anyone have a debian/rules fragment to
do that automatically at package build time?

Thanks,
zw


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On Tue, Nov 20, 2007 at 12:58:10PM -0800, Zack Weinberg wrote:
> or should I be pasting the entire text of AUTHORS into
> debian/copyright?

Yes you should. The promise we make in Policy is that the copyright and
licensing status of the package is provided in the debian/copyright
file, and the only exception we make is that common-licenses are
incorporated by reference and not by textual inclusion. The idea is
that it is sufficient to extract that one file from the package to get
this information.

I don't believe you can build the copyright file at build time either.
From Policy 12.5:

A copy of the file which will be installed in
/usr/share/doc/package/copyright should be in debian/copyright in the
source package.

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Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho, Jyväskylä, Finland
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