Which files should go in ‘/usr/share/common-licenses/’? (was: Has Copyright summarizing outlived its usefulness?)

[Ben Finney <bignose@debian.org>]

Wookey <wookey@wookware.org> writes:

> On 2017-12-08 01:42 +0100, Markus Koschany wrote:
> > Why don't we add all DFSG-free licenses to
> > /usr/share/common-licenses or /usr/share/free-licenses instead?
>
> I would second this. It seems odd that we only have a small subset in
> common-licences so I often end up finding/copying in a copy to the
> copyright file by hand. This seems like makework.

I am sympathetic to this. There is significant value in being able to
put a “License: GPL-3” paragraph that doesn't repeat the entire GPL v3,
and instead refers the reader to ‘/usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-3’.

The files in ‘/usr/share/common-licenses/’ get installed on every Debian
system, by the ‘base-files’ package. This is needed because that allows
‘/usr/share/doc/…/copyright’ to refer to a file there, knowing it will
be available.

If I understand correctly, the justification of putting a file there
must include that it is overwhelmingly more likely to save *storage
space* overall (by reducing the space in a corresponding number of
‘/usr/share/doc/…/copyright’ files), especially on machines that have
low disk space in ‘/usr/share/’.

So I think we should specifically ask the position of people who have
expertise maintaining machines with very small disk space: How to judge
which files should be unilaterally installed in that directory, in the
hope of saving not only the efforts of package maintainers, but also the
storage requirements on storage-constrained systems.

-- 
 \      “It seems intuitively obvious to me, which means that it might |
  `\                                           be wrong.” —Chris Torek |
_o__)                                                                  |
Ben Finney