Full Licence field

Tom "spot" Callaway tcallawa at redhat.com
Fri Mar 20 20:15:49 UTC 2009


On 03/20/2009 04:06 PM, Lyos Gemini Norezel wrote:
> Pity. A %license (ie., like the %doc) field would be nice to have.

Indeed. This is where I think the most interesting work needs to be
done. Once rpm knows that a %license file is a special type of %doc that
gets installed even if --excludedocs is passed, we have solved one of
the big issues for the OLPC folks.

>> * Compare it against the set of known "Generic" licenses.
>> * If it is an exact match, replace it with a symlink to the Generic
>> license.
>>
>> Now, the problem is that if you do this in yum, you'll break rpm
>> verification of any package handled in such a way. 
> 
> Oh? Why is that?

Well, in order for this to work, the license text has to be a real file
in the binary RPM manifest. If yum replaced that actual file with a
symlink, it will no longer match the binary RPM manifest, and rpm -V
will report that the file has been changed (which, is true, but of
little relevance in such a scenario).

~spot




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