Full Licence field

[Josh Boyer]

On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 05:33:12PM -0400, Chuck Anderson wrote:
>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.

You're quick to declare that without really thinking about it.  I agree 
that on a typical desktop setup, 17MiB is pretty insignificant.  However
for projects like OLPC, which is a downstream user of Fedora, 17MiB can
be quite a space hit for simple text files.

Now, OLPC has other ways of dealing with this at the moment, but at
some point they won't.

josh