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Re: Which files should go in ‘/usr/share/common-licenses/’?



Am 08.12.2017 um 05:18 schrieb Russ Allbery:
> Ben Finney <bignose@debian.org> writes:
> 
>> 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.
> 
> +1.  I'd love some guidance on this.  I'm not convinced that our current
> Policy approach is best here.

Users who are facing this kind of limitations will most likely remove
/usr/share/common-licenses, /usr/share/doc and /usr/share/man and maybe
more already. I don't think that it makes any difference to them if we
install 5 or 50 text files into /usr/share/common-licenses and the
benefit for package maintainers is far greater.

> Although I'm not convinced that we want to put *every* DFSG-free license
> there, since there are a lot of licenses only used by single packages, and
> I'm not sure it's a good idea to have 80 copies of the Expat license with
> all of its wording variants.

I believe most people would be happy if we included this version. [1]

> Please note that I'm pretty sure I can speak for the Policy maintainers as
> a group in saying that no way are we taking on the responsibility for
> determining what licenses are DFSG-free or not, so we'll need some source
> of information for what licenses are eligible for inclusion from someone
> else (probably ftpmaster, maybe via NEW processing).

Someone set up a wiki page: https://wiki.debian.org/DFSGLicenses
We could just build upon this content and complete the work by linking
to accepted packages in main that are using those DFSG licenses.

Shall I file another bug report against the Debian Policy or can we
reuse one of the existing bug reports for this matter?

Regards,

Markus


[1] https://www.debian.org/legal/licenses/mit

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