[Debian-olpc-devel] Redundant Copying File

[Luke Faraone]

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Please ask such questions on the mailing list, so that everyone can
learn from your questions.

On 07/23/2010 08:13 AM, Ankur Khurana wrote:
> hi,
> you have mentioned about redundant Copying files being generated when
> building package and asked them to remove while in clean rule.Can you
> Elaborate on this , i was somewhat confused on this topic .
> 
> you mentioned it here :
> http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/debian-olpc-devel/2010-July/002582.html 
> 
>                                  
> http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/debian-olpc-devel/2010-July/002591.html
> 
> I went through the  link
> <http://build-common.alioth.debian.org/cdbs-doc.html#id2542963> you
> provided but i was still confused .

This is an issue reported by lintian, and you can find the description
of the warning online[1].

Basically, COPYING is the canonical file name of a license file. It
usually contains the GPL or something similar. Since we already include
either the full license text (or abbreviated with a pointer to the full
in common-licenses) in debian/copyright (which is installed into
/usr/share/doc/<package>/copyright), it's redundant for the package to
have additional copies.

So, to get rid of the warning, you should remove the file in the
"install::" rule in your debian/rules. See for example line 73 and 74 of
sugar-write-activity's debian/rules[2].

You can verify that this is no longer occurring by running "lintian
- -iIv" on the .deb produced as a result of doing a binary build of the
package.

[1]: http://lintian.debian.org/tags/extra-license-file.html
[2]:
http://git.debian.org/?p=collab-maint/sugar-write-activity.git;f=debian/rules;h=e24c164#l73

- -- 
Luke Faraone
http://luke.faraone.cc
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