Bug#690495: Prohibit click-through licenses or disclaimers

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org> writes:

> I don't intend this as a slippery slope; I very specifically want to
> cover the types of annoyances mentioned in the above paragraph, which
> almost no software in Debian actually includes.  See the transmission
> bug I linked to in the original bug submission.

> If you installed something from Debian main, I think you'd find it
> rather upsetting to run that software and get a prompt saying "By
> running this software, you agree that ..." with an "I Agree" button.
> This suggested policy change tries to cover cases like that; nothing
> more.

I agree that it's annoying, and I would also consider it a bug.  I'm not
sure that it belongs in Policy, though.  Not all bugs are Policy
violations, and there are an infinite number of ways to make mistakes in
packaging.  We have to decide which of them are important enough, and
relevant enough to the overall consistency of experience, to call out
specifically in Policy.

To me, this feels like a specific instance of the general problem of
excessive maintainer script prompting.  I'm not sure there's anything
specifically objectionable about notifying the user of the license terms
(which presumably are DFSG-free given that the software is in main)
compared to notifying the user of all sorts of other useless information
during package installation that they don't need to know, such as pointers
to upstream home pages, unnecessary examples, a picture of the author's
cat, or what have you.

Policy already says, among other things:

    If a package has a vitally important piece of information to pass to
    the user (such as "don't run me as I am, you must edit the following
    configuration files first or you risk your system emitting
    badly-formatted messages"), it should display this in the config or
    postinst script and prompt the user to hit return to acknowledge the
    message.  Copyright messages do not count as vitally important (they
    belong in /usr/share/doc/package/copyright); neither do instructions
    on how to use a program (these should be in on-line documentation,
    where all the users can see them).

which is fairly close to what you're asking for, although isn't worded as
well as it could be ("copyright messages," for example, instead of
"license statements," which is what is actually being displayed).  I'd
prefer to work on that language if necessary rather than adding a new
statement, possibly by strengthening the degree to which Policy says to
not prompt unnecessarily.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>