[R-pkg-devel] Properly referencing copied code

[@@j5xsj9 m@iii@g oii @iiiy@@ddy@io]

Thanks that helps. Are there any thoughts on the feedback I was given? I'm still a bit confused on the note:

> Has copyright holders of included software in a [ctb] role only

I think I'm being asked to add the cph role to essentially every author in addition to ctp but that doesn't seem to be what the CRAN policy wants and I still don't know how to decide who gets both. Right now there are several people who have explicit copyright over certain code so I would think just add cph to all those authors? Or just give everyone cph who isn't a minor contributor?

 - DRC

On Friday, July 12th, 2024 at 3:07 AM, Ivan Krylov 'ikrylov at disroot.org' <anj5xsj9+ikrylov=disroot.org using nilly.addy.io> wrote:

> 
> В Thu, 11 Jul 2024 20:58:53 +0000
> DRC via R-package-devel r-package-devel using r-project.org пишет:
> 
> > 1. How does linking to external libs differ from providing the source
> > of a library and linking against that?
> 
> 
> I think that the author information in the DESCRIPTION is about what
> your package provides by itself, not everything that may end up in the
> address space once the package is loaded. Since CRAN prefers
> self-contained packages, we end up including them in our packages
> (unless the third-party library is already very common and present in
> RTools & macOS recipes & common GNU/Linux distros), which requires us
> to specify their authors.
> 
> > Do I need to provide references to lapack and blas if they aren't
> > shipped with the package? What about math (lm)?
> 
> 
> No.
> 
> > 2. What roles to supply to authors of external software?
> 
> > Do I need to differentiate between authors with explicit copyrights
> > `c('ctb', 'cph')` vs those who are authors but are not listed as
> > copyright holders `c('ctb')` in the third party source? Or just give
> > everyone both?
> 
> 
> I would expect most authors and contributors to be copyright holders
> too, but it must be possible to contribute without providing patches
> and becoming one. E.g. a project might recognise a tester and bug
> reporter as a full author, but there is no code that they own any
> copyright on.
> 
> > 3. One of my dependencies has a lot of copyright holders throughout
> > the source. Most of these are for individual functions and cmake
> > files that are not directly used by my package. What is the best way
> > to handle this? Add as much of the unused parts of the third party
> > package to the .Rbuildignore file as possible to filter out the
> > unused parts?
> 
> 
> If it's feasible to implement, omitting unused files from the tarball
> is a good idea.
> 
> > 4. Is there a better place to put all these authors? The author list
> > has already gotten large and I still have many more to add.
> 
> 
> CRAN recognises inst/AUTHORS. Here's a recently released package with
> no obvious problems that makes use of it:
> https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=xlcharts
> 
> We should probably document it somewhere.
> 
> --
> Best regards,
> Ivan