[Sugar-devel] Full Licence field

[Tom "spot" Callaway]

On 03/20/2009 03:38 PM, Lyos Gemini Norezel wrote:
> Isn't it possible to figure that out with a bit of bash programming?
> Eg., use the 'comm' command.
> "comm     Compare two sorted files line by line"
> 
> and, if different, a diff could be generated to show you exactly what's
> different.
> 
> Doesn't seem like much of a hassle to me.

Are you volunteering to do the work then?

> How difficult would it be to add functionality in yum:
> a.) to store the license value of each program, and
> b.) to integrate a license reader for easy access/reading?

I'm going to go out on a limb and say this isn't what we want. It will
just bloat the yum metadata for a rather minimal benefit.

Returning to the original problem, I'd rather see a transaction workflow
like this:

* Look at what a package has marked as a 'license file' (NOTE: RPM
doesn't really have support for this yet)
* Compare it against the set of known "Generic" licenses.
* If it is an exact match, replace it with a symlink to the Generic license.

Now, the problem is that if you do this in yum, you'll break rpm
verification of any package handled in such a way. It might be possible
to have RPM do this automagically, but I suspect they'd think it is a
monstrous hack. There are RPM devs lurking on this list, I wonder if
they will chime in.

~spot