Re: auto-inserting COPYING

[Karl Berry]

    I think it would make Automake less convenient, which is why I chose
    against it, but that's of course only my opinion.

I think the potential for confusion outweighs by far the trivial
convenience, but that's of course only my opinion too.

    And yes, the only other sane semantics IMVHO would be to let automake
    fail hard in 'gnu' and 'gnits' mode if COPYING is not present.

I agree.

    Adding a yes-please-copy-COPYING option does not seem sensible either.

I agree.

    RMS never suggested the solution I used, but if I understood him
    correctly, then he did not veto it either.  Maybe I should ask again.

Well, that would be the way to get a definitive answer (and hence your
deniability, etc., if he rejects it).  But I leave it to you whether you
want to do it, since I don't know what was said before.

I won't argue the point farther (*).  Thanks for your patience.

karl

(*) At least until the issue comes up again :).  The only reason I
brought it up now is because a savannah user wished to leave COPYING out
of his source tree, considering it a generated file because automake
inserted it.  On the savannah side of things, we just want the projects
to always have the license.  Anything else would be maddeningly
confusing.  I realize the situation with privately-held projects can be
different.