Say what the terms are, and how to install under them

The program had no licence file at all, and pyproject claimed MIT into
the void.  It is now the GNU General Public License, version 3 or later:
LICENSE holds the text verbatim, pyproject declares it with the OSI
classifier, both .deb builds write /usr/share/doc/<pkg>/copyright in the
machine-readable format Policy requires, both manuals carry a COPYING
section, and --version prints the GNU notice on both programs.

INSTALL.md is the step-by-step: what you need, the Debian package, the
virtual environment for everywhere else, how to check it worked, every
optional dependency with what it buys and what happens without it, and
the errors people actually hit first -- PEP 668 at the top, because on
Debian a plain "pip install ." refuses and reads as a broken program.

Speech transcription gets its own four steps, because it is the only
part with a real download in it: the recogniser into the environment
bandsaunter runs from, checking it took, the model (base.en, 148 MB,
from Hugging Face into ~/.cache/huggingface, fetched deliberately rather
than in the middle of a scan), then turning it on.  With the sizes of
every model, the offline routes, and what to do when --engines says no
although pip says yes.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016PsWPTweCT6pwxKngvVxcg

packaging/bandsaunter.1

@@ -1,5 +1,5 @@
 .\" Generated by packaging/make-man.py -- do not edit by hand.
-.TH BANDSAUNTER 1 "2026-09-03" "bandsaunter 2026-09-03_03" "User Commands"
+.TH BANDSAUNTER 1 "2026-09-03" "bandsaunter 2026-09-03_05" "User Commands"
 .SH NAME
 bandsaunter \- scan, record and identify radio signals with an RTL-SDR
 .SH SYNOPSIS
@@ -1481,6 +1481,20 @@ transcripts and their identifications, on one screen.
 .PP
 The README shipped with the package covers the same ground at greater length,
 including why the detection thresholds are what they are.
+.SH COPYING
+Copyright \(co 2026 The Dust Council.
+.PP
+This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under
+the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software
+Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later
+version. It is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY
+WARRANTY \[em] without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS
+FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for the full
+terms, in
+.I /usr/share/doc/bandsaunter/copyright
+or at
+.UR https://www.gnu.org/licenses/
+.UE .
 .SH BUGS
 The DVB-T television driver claims these dongles on sight. If the receiver
 cannot be opened, that is almost always why: the package blacklists the

packaging/build-deb.sh

@@ -19,8 +19,23 @@ mkdir -p "$site/bandsaunter" "$pkgdir/usr/bin" "$pkgdir/DEBIAN" \
          "$pkgdir/usr/share/doc/bandsaunter"
 
 cp "$here"/bandsaunter/*.py "$site/bandsaunter/"
-cp "$here/README.md" "$pkgdir/usr/share/doc/bandsaunter/"
+cp "$here/README.md" "$here/INSTALL.md" "$pkgdir/usr/share/doc/bandsaunter/"
 gzip -9n "$pkgdir/usr/share/doc/bandsaunter/README.md"
+gzip -9n "$pkgdir/usr/share/doc/bandsaunter/INSTALL.md"
+
+# Debian Policy requires the licence verbatim, at this exact path, in every
+# package.  The header above it is the machine-readable format apt tools read.
+{
+    echo "Format: https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/"
+    echo "Upstream-Name: bandsaunter"
+    echo
+    echo "Files: *"
+    echo "Copyright: 2026 The Dust Council"
+    echo "License: GPL-3.0-or-later"
+    echo
+    echo "License: GPL-3.0-or-later"
+    sed 's/^$/./; s/^/ /' "$here/LICENSE"
+} > "$pkgdir/usr/share/doc/bandsaunter/copyright"
 
 # Regenerated from the settings table rather than copied, so the manual
 # cannot describe a version of the settings that no longer exists.

packaging/build-repo.sh

@@ -40,7 +40,7 @@ pip download --quiet --only-binary=:all: --dest "$wheels" faster-whisper >&2
 
 pkg="$stage/bandsaunter-transcribe_${version}-${revision}_${arch}"
 vendor="$pkg/usr/lib/bandsaunter/vendor"
-mkdir -p "$vendor" "$pkg/DEBIAN"
+mkdir -p "$vendor" "$pkg/DEBIAN" "$pkg/usr/share/doc/bandsaunter-transcribe"
 for w in "$wheels"/*.whl; do
     python3 -m zipfile -e "$w" "$vendor/"
 done
@@ -53,6 +53,22 @@ rm -rf "$vendor"/numpy "$vendor"/numpy-* "$vendor"/yaml "$vendor"/PyYAML-* \
 rm -f "$vendor"/*.pth
 find "$vendor" -name "__pycache__" -type d -exec rm -rf {} + 2>/dev/null || true
 
+# The packaging is this project's; the wheels inside keep their own terms.
+{
+    echo "Format: https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/"
+    echo "Upstream-Name: bandsaunter"
+    echo
+    echo "Files: *"
+    echo "Copyright: 2026 The Dust Council"
+    echo "License: GPL-3.0-or-later"
+    echo " The packaging in this file is under the GNU General Public License,"
+    echo " version 3 or later, whose full text is in the bandsaunter package at"
+    echo " /usr/share/doc/bandsaunter/copyright.  The Python wheels vendored"
+    echo " under /usr/lib/bandsaunter/vendor are third-party works distributed"
+    echo " under their own licences, each carried in that package's own"
+    echo " dist-info directory beside it."
+} > "$pkg/usr/share/doc/bandsaunter-transcribe/copyright"
+
 cat > "$pkg/DEBIAN/control" <<EOF
 Package: bandsaunter-transcribe
 Version: ${version}-${revision}
@@ -78,6 +94,8 @@ say "collecting the $model model"
 modelpkg="$stage/bandsaunter-model-$(echo "$model" | tr '._' '--')_${version}-${revision}_all"
 modeldir="$modelpkg/usr/share/bandsaunter/models/$model"
 mkdir -p "$modeldir" "$modelpkg/DEBIAN"
+modeldoc="$modelpkg/usr/share/doc/bandsaunter-model-$(echo "$model" | tr '._' '--')"
+mkdir -p "$modeldoc"
 PYTHONPATH="$stage/wheels-unused" python3 - "$hf_repo" "$modeldir" <<'PY' >&2
 import shutil, sys
 from pathlib import Path
@@ -92,6 +110,20 @@ for item in src.iterdir():
     shutil.copy2(item.resolve(), target)
 PY
 
+{
+    echo "Format: https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/"
+    echo "Upstream-Name: bandsaunter"
+    echo
+    echo "Files: *"
+    echo "Copyright: 2026 The Dust Council"
+    echo "License: GPL-3.0-or-later"
+    echo " The packaging is under the GNU General Public License, version 3 or"
+    echo " later, whose full text is in the bandsaunter package at"
+    echo " /usr/share/doc/bandsaunter/copyright.  The model weights under"
+    echo " /usr/share/bandsaunter/models are a third-party work, redistributed"
+    echo " under the terms the model was published with."
+} > "$modeldoc/copyright"
+
 cat > "$modelpkg/DEBIAN/control" <<EOF
 Package: bandsaunter-model-$(echo "$model" | tr '._' '--')
 Version: ${version}-${revision}

packaging/make-browse-man.py

@@ -485,6 +485,14 @@ The same thing as a map, to open in Google Earth.
 not exist or there is no terminal to draw on.
 .SH SEE ALSO
 .BR bandsaunter (1)
+.SH COPYING
+Copyright \(co 2026 The Dust Council.  Free software under the GNU General
+Public License, version 3 or later; see
+.I /usr/share/doc/bandsaunter/copyright
+or
+.UR https://www.gnu.org/licenses/
+.UE .
+There is no warranty, to the extent permitted by law.
 .SH BUGS
 The list is read when the browser opens.  Press
 .B r

packaging/make-man.py

@@ -874,6 +874,20 @@ transcripts and their identifications, on one screen.
 .PP
 The README shipped with the package covers the same ground at greater length,
 including why the detection thresholds are what they are.
+.SH COPYING
+Copyright \(co 2026 The Dust Council.
+.PP
+This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under
+the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software
+Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later
+version. It is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY
+WARRANTY \[em] without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS
+FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for the full
+terms, in
+.I /usr/share/doc/bandsaunter/copyright
+or at
+.UR https://www.gnu.org/licenses/
+.UE .
 .SH BUGS
 The DVB-T television driver claims these dongles on sight. If the receiver
 cannot be opened, that is almost always why: the package blacklists the

packaging/saunterbrowse.1

@@ -1,5 +1,5 @@
 .\" Generated by packaging/make-browse-man.py -- do not edit by hand.
-.TH SAUNTERBROWSE 1 "2026-09-03" "bandsaunter 2026-09-03_03" "User Commands"
+.TH SAUNTERBROWSE 1 "2026-09-03" "bandsaunter 2026-09-03_05" "User Commands"
 .SH NAME
 saunterbrowse \- read and listen to what a bandsaunter scan collected
 .SH SYNOPSIS
@@ -473,6 +473,14 @@ The same thing as a map, to open in Google Earth.
 not exist or there is no terminal to draw on.
 .SH SEE ALSO
 .BR bandsaunter (1)
+.SH COPYING
+Copyright \(co 2026 The Dust Council.  Free software under the GNU General
+Public License, version 3 or later; see
+.I /usr/share/doc/bandsaunter/copyright
+or
+.UR https://www.gnu.org/licenses/
+.UE .
+There is no warranty, to the extent permitted by law.
 .SH BUGS
 The list is read when the browser opens.  Press
 .B r