Re: missing licence files and incomplete licence lists

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

Dave Love <address@hidden> skribis:

> I realize that a lot of packages don't include licence files
> (e.g. glibc).

You mean ‘COPYING’ & co.?

> I'd mistakenly assumed that was automated according to the "license"
> fields.

Nope.  Outside of GNU there are no real conventions for license file
names anyway.

> Also, some license fields aren't complete -- compare glibc's lgpl with
> the contents of Debian's libc6 "copyright" file, which includes gpl,
> bsd, and others, not just lgpl.

Guix is much less comprehensive than Debian.  The ‘license’ field is
meant to list the license that applies to the combined work.

For glibc, it’s LGPLv2+; glibc includes BSD-licensed work, but that
doesn’t matter from this perspective.

> Should bugs just be filed against each case, or can things be checked
> systematically?

Given the meaning of ‘license’ above, if you find errors, you’re of
course welcome to report them.  But keep in mind that ‘license’ is
looser than the info you’d fine in Debian ‘copyright’ files.

> Related to that, licensecheck doesn't seem to be packaged.  If it was,
> could it be used by "lint" (or something else)?  I don't know whether
> lint is supposed only to process the package description or could look
> at the package contents the way Fedora's review tool does, for instance.

A package for ‘licensecheck’ would be welcome.

I don’t think we should implement something like this in ‘guix lint’
because (1) there are already several tools doing that, and it’s only
ever going to be an approximation anyway, and (2) ‘guix lint’ is meant
to run fast.

HTH!

Ludo’.