Outdated/wrong copyright/license data

[Erich E. Hoover]

The nvidia-settings package has a significant problem with the copyright file. It is either significantly out of date or plain wrong, neglecting a variety of files that have different licenses from the main binary. This is most significant in the portion of the package that provides libXNVCtrl, which is licensed under the Expat license (and therefore compatible with LGPL projects). The current license data implies that it is GPL-only, which would present a problem for LGPL projects. For reference, the upstream Debian package has this covered:
http://metadata.ftp-master.debian.org/changelogs//main/n/nvidia-settings/nvidia-settings_340.46-2_copyright

Ideally the libXNVCtrl library would be split into a separate package (like it is on Debian), but at the very least the copyright/license data should be corrected.

[Hans Joachim Desserud (hjd)]

Hi, saw this issue and just thought I'd mention that in order to resolve a build failure issue, there's been an attempt to merge the latest packaging from Debian. Presumably that would fix this issue as well if it goes through. See bug 1327753 for details.

[Erich E. Hoover (ehoover)]

Hi Hans,

Yes, this would fix the issue (provided that the copyright file gets updated with the version from upstream). We (wine staging tree) would greatly prefer that this package get merged with upstream since upstream has the lib provided dynamically. Is there a time-table on this happening or is there someone we can poke?

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Hans Joachim Desserud (hjd)]

>Is there a time-table on this happening or is there someone we can poke?

I don't know about a time-table, but the maintainer of the package commented on the issue so he will probably look into it.

[Graham Inggs (ginggs)]

I'll add a new debdiff to LP: #1327753 and merge in debian/copyright from the Debian packaging.

[Sebastian Lackner (slackner)]

Even though it was only shortly mentioned, and is not the main subject of this bug: It would also be nice if the second issue, providing a dynamically linked library similar to Debian, could be resolved (maybe even in the same step when merging with the changes from the Debian package).

It would have a lot of advantages for the Wine feature we're working on right now when we could just dynamically load the library. On Debian this already works very well and avoids increasing the package size and also possible license issues.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package nvidia-settings - 346.47-0ubuntu1

---------------
nvidia-settings (346.47-0ubuntu1) vivid; urgency=medium

  [ Graham Inggs ]
  * Enable building for armhf.
  * New packages libxnvtrl0 and libxnvctrl-dev. (LP: #1327753)
  * Sync all patches from 343.22-1 in Debian experimental.
  * Merge debian/copyright from 343.22-1 in Debian experimental,
    add Ubuntu contributors, update copyright years. (LP: #1429974)
 -- Alberto Milone <email address hidden> Wed, 18 Mar 2015 12:41:58 +0100