Am 24.05.19 um 00:21 schrieb mar77i via arch-general: ...
To answer my own question, of course I screwed it up already. Okay, so license=('custom:MIT'), license=('MIT') or license=('custom')?
manual says: put licenses from /usr/share/licenses/common into the license array, otherwise use 'custom' / 'custom:LicenseName'.
Depending on how many PKGBUILDs you've looked at in the past, you might think, of course, you put license=('MIT') for MIT licensed projects in your PKGBUILD. Which, as we now established, is incorrect, yet not actually enforced, and the more important part of getting this right is to have the original license file with the copyright notice in the package, as the document usually asks.
I think we can bikeshed over the prefered 'custom' or 'custom:MIT' details from here on, however, a quick glance at my pacman database shows that a lot of repo packages actually don't do what the manpage say, of which there are asp, wayland, sdl2... (the list goes on).
Those packages follow the exception published in the wiki[1] which allows license=('MIT') if you also include the exact license text with copyright notice in /usr/share/licenses/pkgname. This text has been there since the creation of the wiki page in November 2009[2] and I believe before that it was on another wiki page that has since been deleted without preserving its history[3], so I don't know where it came from. Should this really be declared as wrong now? Relevant paragraph of [1]:
The BSD, ISC, MIT, zlib/png and Python licenses are special cases and could not be included in the licenses package. For the sake of the license array, it is treated as a common license (license=('BSD'), license=('ISC'), license=('MIT'), license=('ZLIB') and license=('Python')), but technically each one is a custom license, because each one has its own copyright line. Any packages licensed under these four should have its own unique license stored in /usr/share/licenses/pkgname.
[1]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PKGBUILD#license [2]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php?title=PKGBUILD&diff=85178&oldid=85175 [3]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php?title=Building_Packages_in_Arch_Linux&action=history