Bug#883950: debian-policy: allow specifying common licenses with only the identifier

[Simon McVittie <smcv@debian.org>]

On Sat, 09 Dec 2017 at 19:57:26 +0100, Mattia Rizzolo wrote:
> First of all, I'd like policy to stop being unclear on this matter, or
> state whether the correct form is [a brief license reference] or
> [the full license grant].

This is not really Policy's decision: it's the ftp team (cc'd) who decide
what they are willing to accept into Debian, and they require the license
grant[1] to be reproduced[2]. As far as I'm aware, it isn't documented
anywhere *why* it is required. ftp team: please could you clarify this?
The main possibilities seem to be:

* it might be a legal requirement imposed on us by copyright
  holders/copyright laws (in which case we must continue; but this seems
  unlikely, since Fedora is backed by a US corporation that is a much
  more attractive target for lawsuits than Debian, and they seem happy
  with their 1-line summaries);
* it might be a self-imposed requirement in order to meet some goal
  (in which case whether to continue is a Debian project decision,
  hopefully based on comparing the cost/work of keeping this requirement
  with the benefit of meeting that goal)

I would like the amount of debian/copyright work that is enforced by RC
bugs and package removals to be as small as it can be, but we can't know
which parts are critical and which parts are nice-to-have without knowing
why they're required. If some deficiencies in d/copyright are harmful
to a Debian goal but do not threaten redistributability or the Social
Contract, then the severity of the resulting bugs can be set according
to the importance of that goal, and the bugs can be fixed by the people
who care most about that goal, in Debian's usual "do-ocracy" way.

[1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2015/05/msg00473.html
[2] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2006/03/msg00023.html
    (in that mail Joerg called the license grant the "license headers",
    but I believe the canonical jargon term is that it's a license grant)

> Secondly (which would overcome the first matter as well), I'd like to
> propose to just stop wasting time/bytes in dumping such useless
> boilerplte in our `debian/copyright`s when a license is available in
> /usr/share/common-licenses.

I would like this too, but only if the ftp team will actually accept it:
it would be actively harmful to clarify Policy in a direction that
doesn't match what is allowed through the NEW queue.

    smcv