On Wed, Nov 28, 2007 at 11:02:25PM +0000, Ciaran McCreesh wrote: > On Wed, 28 Nov 2007 23:54:57 +0100 > Thilo Bangert <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > there is also the legal argument. it's better to state explicitly > > which versions apply and not have to cleanup the mess, when somebody > > decides to release GPL-2.5. > That's an argument strongly in favour of ranged specs. A huge number of > packages are licensed under "GPL 2 or later", and currently most ebuilds > incorrectly use LICENSE="GPL-2" for these. Even changing these to > LICENSE="|| ( GPL-2 GPL-3 )" just shifts the problem around a bit. With > CRAN "GPL 2 or later" translates to "GPL (>= 2)", which is a much more > accurate description of a package's license. Going beyond the GPL, there are a number of other license statements that use an 'or later' clause, but there is only one version of the license present so far. Doing the _or_later suffix hack is a bit nasty, because then you expect to find that as a file in licenses/, or need to have special handling for it.
I'm for ranged licenses, but I think attention needs to be paid to the syntax. The postfix [] form does nicely separate the version information from the actual license name (moreso than the traditional CPV atom), but the LGPL[>=2&<3] example looks to be overloading it, when we already have AND/OR at the higher level. LICENSE="|| ( Eclipse ( LGPL[>=2] LGPL[<3] ) )" Which is, Eclipse OR (LGPL v2 up to, but not including LGPLv3). -- Robin Hugh Johnson Gentoo Linux Developer & Infra Guy E-Mail : [EMAIL PROTECTED] GnuPG FP : 11AC BA4F 4778 E3F6 E4ED F38E B27B 944E 3488 4E85
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