svn commit: r345472 - in head/mail: mmr smtpfeed

Alexey Dokuchaev danfe at FreeBSD.org
Tue Mar 11 06:37:46 UTC 2014


On Mon, Mar 10, 2014 at 07:43:09PM -0400, Eitan Adler wrote:
> LICENSE= is largely useless for actual lawyers,

Can you elaborate on this a bit, for those of us who didn't get their feet
wet in the legal pool?  If some well-defined terms of some license can be
abbreviated as, say, GPLv2, why do we have to provide a full copy in every
individual port?

If we must provide a copy nonetheless (e.g. under Section 1 of GPL), why
can't pkg(8) put a symlink under /usr/local/share/licences/foo-1.42 to the
verbatim GPL text?  (Instead of umpteen number of small, identical files,
none of them being a full copy, -- what we're doing now.)

> but setting LICENSE_FILE can be kind of helpful.

Shouldn't "Kind of" sound too vague to actual lawyers? :)

> In addition setting LICENSE_FILE can help to find mistakes in LICENSE=
> more easily.

It can help, but it can be done without it, just by grepping through the
source tree for certain signatures.

> IMHO LICENSE_FILE should always be set.

Gentoo portages only set LICENSE in their ebuilds, AFAIR.  Why they can
get away without LICENSE_FILE, and we cannot?  Not to mention that this
knob uglifies the Makefile.

./danfe


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