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Documenting Your Work

Once you have volounteered to verify a section or want to work on a section, checking the licence and documenting it in the wiki is a pretty simple process. I will outline here how I have documented the section that I have been verifying.

Verifying a package

Once you have located the repositories closest to you, follow guidelines for verification as laid out here. I tend to also save a copy of the relevant licence(s) of the packages that I have checked, on my computer in its own folder for personal record.

Documenting in the wiki

It would be a good idea to familiarize yourself with the basic editing techniques of PmWiki before you start in earnest. The formatting rules are really very easy, and you will find that it takes a matter of minutes to pick up the basics.

Although licences should be verified by downloading the tarball from the gNewSense repositories, it is useful to have a link to the Ubuntu changelog because the same licence is invariably stored there in an easily linkable form. The Ubuntu changelogs can be found at the following URL.

http://changelogs.ubuntu.com/changelogs/pool/

You may notice that the Ubuntu changelog contains packages not included in the gNewSense list, these are packages that are not included in gNewSense for obvious copyright reasons. It makes no difference to us as we will be ignoring them, we are using the changelog to link to the licences that are relevant to the gNewSense package list.

When you open a link on the package list that you have volounteered for, a blank wiki page will automatically be created for that link. It is on this page that you will document the licence information for that particular list.

• Begin the page with a link to both the repository list that you are checking and the changelog for that same section. You will probably find these links more useful than anybody else, as you will be browsing these pages quite a lot as you work through the section.
• Set up a table with three columns titled "Package", "Licence" and "Free?" respectively. For an example follow this link, click edit and you will see how simple it is to do.
• Once a package has been checked, fill out the information in your table. The same licence that you have checked in the tarball will usually be available in the most recent changelog entry for that package, and this is what you should probably link to in the "Licence" column of your table. If the changelog does not contain a copy of the licence or you think it incomplete, just link to a new wiki page and copy/paste the licence(s) from the downloaded tarball and include any information that you may think relevant, common sense should be used here.
• Finally, if a package can be verified as free enter yes in the "Free?" column of your table. If the licence is questionable report it and document it anyway. You should also file a bug report for the suspect package here, just follow the 'new bug' link and fill out the form with relevant info. If the package is removed from gNewSense you can then remove it from your table, until then it should be documented just as the free packages.
• On a final note, if you are checking library packages you may not always find copyright info in the tar.gz. In this case there will (in my experience) be a copyright file in the changelog. Seeing as we link to the changelog this is probably a moot point but just something I have noticed.