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Date: Mon, 31 Oct 2011 16:27:17 +1100
From: Luke Kendall <luke DOT kendall AT cisra DOT canon DOT com DOT au>
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Subject: Re: Contributing license information?
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David Sastre wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 03:50:45PM +0200, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
>   
>> On Oct 25 12:00, Luke Kendall wrote:
>>     
>>> Corinna Vinschen wrote:
>>>       
>>>> On Aug 19 11:09, Luke Kendall wrote:
>>>>         
>>>>> Soon, I will have prepared a list of the location of every license
>>>>> file in every Cygwin package.  My motivation is to make it easy for
>>>>> people to find the license information, if they need it.
>>>>>
>>>>> (Preparing this information has required a lot of work on my part,
>>>>> so I would be happy if something could be done to make it easy to
>>>>> keep the information up to date as packages are added and modified.)
>>>>>
>>>>> What is the best way to contribute the license-location information
>>>>> so it can be integrated into Cygwin?
>>>>>           
>>>> Just create a new package for the distro which keeps the information
>>>> and maintain it.  Somebody will have to keep the information up to date
>>>> anyway.
>>>>         
>>> Is usr/share/doc/common-licenses/ within the "base-files" package,
>>> supposed to be the place where all license information is collected?
>>> Should I just use that instead of creating a new package?
>>>       
>> Sure, why not, if that's ok with David.  You can also rip out the
>> usr/share/doc/common-licenses directory from base-files and create
>> a licenses package with all licenses.  Just as you two want it.
>>     
>
> There's also another solution: include licensing information within
> base-files, and co-mantain it. It's already under version control.
> Luke, if it's ok with you, I'd go this way.
>
>   
Maybe.

Before I agree, let me be frank and say that I would still prefer for 
the license information to be stored in the setup.ini information for 
each package in a "licenses:" section, and I would love to see the 
Cygwin package submission process to include the adding of the license 
information as an explicit step.

But, if that's not possible/acceptable, then I think the above proposal 
is a reasonable workaround, even though it means more work overall, 
especially ongoing work.

I also don't look forward to maintaining the information, but I'm 
prepared to wait and see how much work it is.  If I can automate the 
effort required for updates, then that would be a good result.

So, I agree with Dave's suggestion.  Should we try to clarify what we 
mean by "licensing information"?
I think it includes:

1) (Each version of) the licenses themselves (in whatever form they are 
provided: .txt, PDF, ...)
2) Information about what licenses are used in each package (including 
which version of the license)
3) To achieve (2), that means we have to have some way (a name) to refer 
to each license.

Let's also think about how and when the license information gets updated.

It may need updating when any package is updated, since it is possible 
that the license can change as part of a version change.  (The change 
could be a change to the wording, or it could be a shift to a new 
version of a license, or the inclusion of other sub-components with 
their own license, etc. etc.)

But that means "base-files" may need to change on a daily basis.  There 
will probably be a time lag in updating the license info if it is not 
updated at the same time that setup.ini is updated with the new 
packages.  Is setup.ini re-created automatically when a package is updated?

The problem gets more complex if you consider that setup.ini can refer 
to multiple package versions, and there may have been license changes 
between the versions.

Those are further reasons I think it's more elegant to add the license 
info to the setup.ini file.  But is the setup.ini creation currently 
automated?  If so there will be some occasions where the license info 
can't be automatically updated (and will require some human thought  to 
fill in details).

What do you think?

Regards,

luke

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