Hopefully I'm not too late and I hope I won't make any ('dumb') mistakes as
I'm not as well-versed in licenses and packaging as other participants.On Sunday, 10 September 2023 18:16:07 CEST Russ Allbery wrote: > > * The license is DFSG-free. > > * Exactly the same license wording is used by all works covered by it. I think both of these criteria are excellent. > > * The license applies to at least 100 source packages in Debian. > > In the thread so far, there's been a bit of early convergence around my > threshold of 100 packages above. I want to make sure people realize that > this is a very conservative threshold that would mean saying no to most > new license inclusion requests. On Sunday, 10 September 2023 05:35:27 CEST Russ Allbery wrote: > Here are various concerns that people have had in this area in the past. > > * common-licenses consumes disk space on every installed Debian system of > any size, and therefore should be kept small to avoid wasting system > resources. The only reason for not doing so that I've detected is worry about disk space? If we were talking about several Megabytes (or even larger) then I could see that point. But license text is max several Kilobytes? diederik@bagend:/usr/share/doc$ find . -name copyright | wc -l 3759 I suspect I have an enormous amount of duplicate license texts on this system and replacing those with references to common-licenses will likely reduce the waste of system resources. Optionally the license texts in common-licenses could be gz compressed (gzip is Priority: required) to reduce disk-space even further. So I would be in favor of dropping the threshold. > > * The license text is longer than 25 lines. The primary reason I'm in favor of dropping this too is consistency. On Sunday, 10 September 2023 05:35:27 CEST Russ Allbery wrote: > Here are various concerns that people have had in this area in the past. > > * Including long legal texts in debian/copyright, particularly if one > wants to format them for copyright-format, is tedious and annoying and > doesn't benefit our users in any significant way, and therefore we > should include as many licenses as possible in common-licenses to spare > people that work. This is an important reason why I'd want to have most/all licenses that are used in Debian included in common-licenses. It's not only tedious and annoying, but also (because of that) error prone. And then you run the risk of the included license text not being (word-for- word) the same. Getting rid of tedious/annoying/repeating busy work seems like a win for everyone. And IMO it's not only not beneficial to our users, but actually provides extra work. If I want to make sure the license text is indeed the same as my (hopefully correct) local copy, I'd have to run a `diff` with the included text in the copyright file. And that applies to every user who'd want to do that. And also for a prospective (new) maintainer of a package. I'm a (big) fan of SPDX because it simplifies and clarifies things (a lot IMO) and makes things more consistent. And I'm a sucker for consistency. I do think that the license should be provided locally (and its availability not be dependent on a build step in some other tool). Having a link to an online version may be a useful extra service, but having a working internet connection should not be a requirement (IMO). Cheers, Diederik
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