[Fedora-packaging] License Tag Draft

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Thu, 2007-07-26 at 20:08 -0400, seth vidal wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-07-26 at 16:47 -0700, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
> > On Thu, 2007-07-26 at 19:25 -0400, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> > > And what is the purpose of commenting licenses in the file list, apart
> > > from making the packagers life miserable ?
> > 
> > I agree.  Or at least, I disagree with the example and scope in the
> > Draft.  I don't think we care what the license of an individual built
> > program is.  We might care what the license of a built library is.
> > 
> > Whether it's better to mark libraries with a spec comment or make it
> > mandatory to split libraries that are licensed differently from other
> > code, I don't know, though.
> > 
> 
> How would we know if there is a problem if program X links to lib Y if
> we don't have the licenses of both available.

You don't need the licenses to the same granularity to determine the
degree to which relicensing will cause problems::

Program changes license.
1) Use ldd to find which libraries we link to.
2) Use repoquery to find out which libraries have incompatible
licenses.[1]_
3) Look at the library spec file to determine which library is
incompatible and whether the program even uses the particular library
that has the issue.
4) Package maintainers figure out whether we can do anything to save the
situation or have to discard one of the packages.

Library changes license.
1) Use repoquery to find out which programs link.
2) Use repoquery on the programs to find out which programs have
incompatible licenses.[1]_
3) Package maintainers figure out whether we can do anything to save the
situation or have to throw out one or the other package.

Figuring out which program in a package has an incompatible license
doesn't add value for the library maintainer as they have to involve the
program maintainer in order to fix the situation no matter what.  On the
contrary figuring out which library has a license issue could allow the
program maintainer to determine that they can fix the issue without
involving the other maintainer.

[1]_: Looks like repoquery needs to be enhanced to show the license tag.

-Toshio
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