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List:       gentoo-dev
Subject:    Re: [gentoo-dev] [RFC] Add operator + for licenses (EAPI-4 ?)
From:       Mounir Lamouri <volkmar () gentoo ! org>
Date:       2009-09-03 21:08:07
Message-ID: 4AA03037.7000203 () gentoo ! org
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Sebastian Pipping wrote:
> Mounir Lamouri wrote:
>   
>> It's even worst when we try to use ACCEPT_LICENSE to have a free
>> operating system. Let's suppose 'free' in fsf free and osf free,
>> LGPL-2.1 is free for both but LGPL-2 isn't and we can suppose, most
>> LGPL-2 licensed packages in the tree are LGPL-2+ actually.
>>     
> Are you aware that we have license groups like  @FSF-APPROVED?
> It's set up in  /usr/portage/profiles/license_groups.
>   
Groups are not fixing the problem even for free aspect. If I have a
package licensed to LGPL-2, it's not free approved but if it's LGPL-2+,
it is. So I can't add LGPL-2 to @FSF-APPROVED, we agree ?

>> So, what I propose is to let a license to be suffixed by the + operator.
>> In this case, if a newer license is accepted by ACCEPT_LICENSE, the PM
>> should not filter the package.
>>     
> My vote is against it.  It feels like black magic to me and many
> licenses are not versioned, at least not their reference names in Gentoo.
>
> However I do notice that "GPL-2+" could make things easier.
> Why not introduce a license group for it like @GPL-2+ or so, instead?
> That would be transparent and use existing means.
>
> What do you think?
>   
I don't understand where the black magic is. I agree not so much
licenses are versioned but they probably are the most used (LGPL, GPL,
MPL, Apache, ...).
GPL-2+ as a group make the filtering with ACCEPT_LICENSE easy (even if
we have to suppose license groups are always up-to-date. However, a
group will not add the information in the ebuild. In other words, I will
have GPL-2 and GPL-3 with GPL-2+ in ACCEPT_LICENSE but I will not have
GPL-2+ packages if i set only GPL-3 in ACCEPT_LICENSE.

Anyway, I've seen an issue for licenses already named foo-NUMBER because
with this feature, PM will consider them as versioned. Not a big deal
for most of them but it could be weird like BSD-2+ to have BSD-2 and BSD-4.
ls | grep -e "-[0123456789.]*$" in the licenses directory to see the
concerned licenses
As it has to come with a new EAPI, we can rename some licenses before.

--
Mounir

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