Arch Linux

In the process of being taken care of..

Any chance of some details of how this will be done?

Automating this step in makepkg seems to be the best solution, but I'd like to save on space as much as possible here. For example, I'd like to install only one copy of the GPL and have each package link to that one file.

But it sounds like I can't do that with BSD-licensed software, since each license may be slightly different (yet still classified as BSD?)

Having a single copy of the GPL and linking to that is fine, and will work for several other licences too (MPL, Apache License, etc.). Though you'll have to be sure that packages are using unmodified versions of the licenses (e.g. the kernel uses a modified version of the GPL v2).

However, this won't work for BSD licences, as this is more a style of licence than an actual licence. For these you need to distribute the licence files with the binary package.

Here's a suggestion: add a licensefiles array to PKGBUILD and use that to copy the needed files. Then bung something like this in makepkg (this is example code and would need more work, e.g. it will fail if the source tarball extracts to something other than $pkgname, it also assumes /usr/share/licenses is the right place to put the files):

---------------------------------------------------------
licensedir=pkg/usr/share/licenses/$pkgname-$pkgver
for ((i=0; $i < ${#licensefiles[@]}; ++i)); do
install -D -m644 src/$pkgname/${licensefiles[$i]} \
$licensedir/${licensefiles[$i]}
gzip -9 $licensedir/${licensefiles[$i]}
done
---------------------------------------------------------

If you want to avoid multiple copies of GPL/whatever licenses then put this inside a case $license ... esac statement and give standard actions for other licenses. But the GPL2 is less than 7 kB when gzipped, so is it really worth it?

An alternative method would be to provide a helper function that could be called from build() that would do the same sort of thing (e.g. 'install-license ./COPYING'). Doing it this way mean it could be written to provide more options - wildcards, pulling in files from various bits of the source tree, renaming files, etc. Options like this could be the needed if different bits of a package are under different licences.

Thoughts?

"If you want to avoid multiple copies of GPL/whatever licenses then put this inside a case $license ... esac statement and give standard actions for other licenses. But the GPL2 is less than 7 kB when gzipped, so is it really worth it?"

What if the original package is 7k? You just doubled the size of the package. What about dial-up users? What about those who pay for downstream transfers? What about server size (additional disk overhead)?

It's worth it.

To quote the appropriate old style BSD licence part:

"Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution."

As Arch doesn't really provide any additional documentation or material for each package, there isn't really a place to add it. Keeping any license relevant info in the default package should be enough. This info certainly doesn't need to be in the package info of not yet installed packages.

Isn't it already implementewd with new license field and licenses directory where appropriate licenses should be copied?