Re: Licenses not in /usr/share/common-licenses

[Gergely Nagy <algernon@balabit.hu>]

Michael Gilbert <mgilbert@debian.org> writes:

> On Mon, May 7, 2012 at 11:55 AM, Michael Gilbert wrote:
>> Would it be unreasonable if someone were to start an
>> "uncommon-licenses" package?  Then any package depending on that could
>> use a reference to the license instead of including the full text in
>> debian/copyright.
>
> I realize that this misses a certain aspect of interpreting the
> legalize of licenses, which is that many believe the full text of a
> license needs to accompany all source and binary files.
>
> So then an additional aspect of this solution could be a helper that
> takes a copyright.in containing license file references and replaces
> that with the appropriate full text.

I can add support for something like this to dh-exec, but the usage will
be slightly awkward, since executable debian/copyright is not
supported, but an executable debian/$package.docs is.

So I can write a dh-exec tool that pulls in the right license for you,
and all you need to do to use it, is to not have a debian/copyright in
the source, but (for example) a debian/copyright.in, and this in your
debian/$package.docs:

,----
| #! /usr/bin/dh-exec --with=copyright-magic
| debian/copyright.in | copyright-magic
| README.md
| whatever-else-you want
`----

Of course the syntax would have to change a bit to make more sense, but
I have a bus to catch.

It might even be possible to have a debian/copyright and overwrite it
via debian/$package.docs, but I haven't verified if that would work.

-- 
|8D