Dear Boost developers, I am one of the Debian developers maintaining the Boost package in Debian. As part of packaging policy, we want the copyright status of each file in Debian packages to be documented, which includes at least the name of the copyright holders and the license of that particular file. As you can believe, this is rather complicated for Boost, since there are a lot of files with many copyright holders. I started to use the tool bcp, which among other things is able to collect such copyright information. My clone is available here[1]. However, bcp often is confused by the inconsistent style of how copyright holders are listed in different files, so it required a lot a manual fixing. For example, sometimes copyright years are written before the name, sometimes after, sometimes they're absent; names are sometimes separated by commas, sometimes by newlines, maybe even sometimes by nothing. Sometimes there are spelling mistakes or casing inconsistencies between names, or inconsistent institutions' names. Bcp has some complicated regular expression to overcame all these differences, but the result is brittle at its best. [1] https://salsa.debian.org/gio/boost-copyright Since I am doing this manual work anyway, I might as well update the Boost files so that their copyright headers are more consistent and easy to parse, and then I could submit you patches for having them fixed in the Boost official repositories. My question is: are you interested in this kind of patches? Of course I would still go through the ordinary patch submission procedure. I am just asking if this kind of patches would be well received or not. To better illustrate what I mean, let me consider a few examples (the chosen files are completely random); file libs/log/include/boost/log/exceptions.hpp currently has:
/* * Copyright Andrey Semashev 2007 - 2015. * Distributed under the Boost Software License, Version 1.0. * (See accompanying file LICENSE_1_0.txt or copy at * http://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt) */
I might change this to:
/* * Copyright: 2007-2015 Andrey Semashev * License: Boost Software License, Version 1.0 * (See accompanying file LICENSE_1_0.txt or copy at * http://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt) */
File libs/atomic/include/boost/atomic/fences.hpp has:
/* * Distributed under the Boost Software License, Version 1.0. * (See accompanying file LICENSE_1_0.txt or copy at * http://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt) * * Copyright (c) 2011 Helge Bahmann * Copyright (c) 2013 Tim Blechmann * Copyright (c) 2014 Andrey Semashev */
I might change this to:
/* * Copyright: 2011 Helge Bahmann * Copyright: 2013 Tim Blechmann * Copyright: 2014 Andrey Semashev * License: Boost Software License, Version 1.0 * (See accompanying file LICENSE_1_0.txt or copy at * http://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt) */
I hope these examples illustrate my intention. I think that having more easily parsable copyright holders could be useful for Debian, for Boost and for Boost adopters which should properly care about the licensing of the libraries they use. Thank you, Giovanni. -- Giovanni Mascellani <g.mascellani@gmail.com> Postdoc researcher - Université Libre de Bruxelles