Bug#885698: What licenses should be included in /usr/share/common-licenses?
On Sun, Sep 10, 2023 at 09:00:22AM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Jonas Smedegaard <jonas@jones.dk> writes:
> > Quoting Hideki Yamane (2023-09-10 11:00:07)
>
> >> Hmm, how about providing license-common package and that depends on
> >> "license-common-list", and ISO image provides both, then? It would be
> >> no regressions.
>
> I do wonder why we've never done this. Does anyone know? common-licenses
> is in an essential package so it doesn't require a dependency and is
> always present, and we've leaned on that in the past in justifying not
> including those licenses in the binary packages themselves, but I'm not
> sure why a package dependency wouldn't be legally equivalent. We allow
> symlinking the /usr/share/doc directory in some cases where there is a
> dependency, so we don't strictly require every binary package have a
> copyright file.
Or we could generate DEBIAN/copyright from debian/copyright using data in
license-common-list at build time. So maintainers would not need to manage the copying
themselves.
Cheers,
Bill
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