Re: Bug#380128: info: Incorrect (?) (unclear) copyright statement

[Karl Berry]

Hi Norbert,

    Maybe this email got lost somewhere, so ....

Sorry, I've been away.

    > > Since the file COPYING is not shipped by Debian, I could not check 
there. 

Of course the COPYING file in Texinfo is just the GPL, as it is in
virtually every (original) GNU distribution.  Changing every occurrence
of "COPYING" to /usr/share/doc/info/copyright does not seem right.
(Would include lots of code changes.)  So I'd suggest that Debian link
COPYING to GPL.  But that's an aside.

    > > *Patch both the man page and the programm to refer to 
    > >  /usr/share/doc/info/copyright

If that file includes the actual GPL (and not just the boilerplate), ok.
Otherwise, I think it would be better to point to the GPL, since that's
what the original does.

    > I assume that info is also GPLv2 as I stated in the copyright file, and

Yes, of course.

The man pages are generated with help2man, so they don't really have an
independently copyrightable existence.  It is not entirely clear to me
what wording would be better, but I guess:

  under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

could become

  under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
  the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option)
  any later version.

If that sounds ok to you, I'll ask Brendan (bug-help2man) to change the
default.

By the way, I doubt there is anything special about Texinfo in this
regard.  Anything that uses help2man will presumably have something
similar.  E.g., cp.1 does not mention the GPL at all ... hmm.
Well, I don't think I'll make this my problem :).

Thanks,
Karl