Ben Finney <bignose@debian.org> writes:
> 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.
One minimal compromise could be to put the licenses of the packages in
essential to /usr/share/common-licenses: since those get installed on
any system, it will surely save space to centralize them.
Best
Ole