Re: PROPOSAL: debian/control file to include new License: field
Jari Aalto <jari.aalto@cante.net> writes:
> To my understanding the only way to obtain the license information for a
> package is to actually download it (or install it) and the study the
> content of
> /usr/share/doc/<package>/copyright
> It would be better if user could use the packaging search commands, like
> grep-dctrl -F License ... --and -F package ...
Out of curiosity, why? What problem are you trying to solve?
> PROPOSAL:
> Add new field to the debian/control (which would be generated by
> dh-make):
> License:
> It would contain a canonicalized word to describe the license in
> questions, like:
> GPL, GPL2, GPL3, LGPL, BSD, Perl Artistic, MIT/X ..... Custom
This has been proposed before. One of the problems with this idea is that
many packages have more complex licenses than that, ones that cannot be
easily encapsulated into a single term. Many packages contain files under
various different licenses and many packages are covered under minor
modifications to standard licenses, so coming up with these terms becomes
a bit complicated, can't be fully accurate, and seems likely to spawn a
complicated set of rules that are hard to verify.
In other words, it seems like a lot of work, and it's not clear what
problem it would really solve.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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