On 7/12/07, Thomas Bächler
Dan McGee schrieb:
Since some software we are going to package soon will be released under GPL v3 instead of GPL v2 or later, should we add this license as a separate one named "GPLv3" in the licenses package and begin using this in the license field? This seems like the easiest solution to me, rather than go back and change every occurrence of GPL to GPLv2.
Thoughts? This isn't a very extreme change, but something that we need to consider and I didn't want to make the change without a bit of feedback first.
I have some thoughts about licenses in archlinux in general:
1) makepkg should ensure that the license is either in the licenses package or shipped by the package itself. Otherwise, it should refuse to build the package or at least warn the user. This would also force us to make more strict rules about the location and filenames of licenses.
This might start to get complicated, that is for sure. I also dislike making any additions to makepkg that are as Arch Linux specific as this one would probably be. Although it sounds unbelievable, makepkg is used by others too.
2) pacman should have a -Q --license option to view the license of a package.
pacman -Qi <package> | grep License | awk '{print $3 }' gets the job done for me. Obviously not the prettiest, but this seems like feature bloat to add this. -Dan