Full Licence field

[Chuck Anderson]

On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 04:44:10PM -0400, David Malcolm wrote:
> Thinking aloud, a couple of other approaches:
>   (i) Embed the SHA256 checksum of each license into the path e.g.:
> /usr/share/common-licenses/32b1062f7da84967e7019d01ab805935caa7ab7321a7ced0e30ebe75e5df1670/COPYING
> then have each file's identical implementation of those bytes overwrite
> each other, and you might have many packages owning that path on the
> installed system.  Slight modifications thus lead to different paths.
> 
> That way you still have duplicates in the .rpm files, but an installed
> system has just one copy of each, and each rpm does indeed ship the
> precise license it's required to.
> 
> I suspect that the arguments from crypto and from the legal side will
> "pass through one another like angry ghosts", though (and legal thus
> wins).
> 
>   (ii) Compress the licenses?

How much disk space do all the separate license files currently take?  
My guess is that it is just not going to be worth dealing with 
compressing, hardlinking, or sharing copies of identical files with 
multiple packages, because the saved disk space will be minimal.

On my installed F10 desktop system here are the sizes of all installed 
license files (%doc matching licen|copy|gpl|bsd) combined:

$ echo `rpm -qad | grep -Ei 'licen|copy|gpl|bsd' | xargs stat -c %s` | sed -e's/ /+/g' | bc

16920051

17 megabytes.  Not worth the effort to save space here.