[arch-dev-public] License array format

[Roman Kyrylych]

2007/4/15, Dan McGee <dpmcgee at gmail.com>:
> I don't know if this is a rehash of an old topic, but it hasn't come
> up in a while so I want to stir the pot. We need some standardization
> when it comes to licenses, which are still not in all of the official
> packages. (OpenSSH is missing one!)
>
> Roman and I were discussing on IRC how the license array should look,
> and this example came up:
> license=('custom:BSD' 'custom:MIT' 'GPL')
>
> A few issues to discuss with regard to this example:
> 1. A license like the GPL does not change its text depending on the
> package, while ones such as BSD and MIT do. Thus we definitely need to
> be including these customized licenses when we package these.

Just to add to Dan's words: sadly not all
BSD/MIT/ZLIB/Python/ISC-licensed packages provide license text in a
package.

> 2. For packages that have their own license (no other package will use
> it), do we use 'custom' or 'custom:packagename'?

IMO custom should be OK for everything except those listed in
/usr/share/licenses/common.

> 3. For packages that use a BSD style license (and all other licenses
> like MIT), do we use the custom:prefix? Roman and I have differing
> opinions here. I think we should use the custom: prefix to indicate in
> pacman -Qi output that a license has been installed by the package and
> is not a common license already on the system. Roman thought that the
> custom: was unnecessary and looks ugly.

IMO custom: is redundant but then we should force packagers to provide
license files for BSD/MIT/ZLIB/Python/ISC-licensed packages.

2 and 3 should be decided in the least confusing way.

> Thoughts? I'd like to standardize this and get it on the wiki licenses
> page. <http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Licenses>

-- 
Roman Kyrylych (Роман Кирилич)