Re: A sad case [was Re: pkg_install patch for testing]

[Dieter Baron <dillo%danbala.tuwien.ac.at@localhost>]

In article <20090630164350.GL513%nef.pbox.org@localhost> Alistair wrote:
: On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 06:10:46PM +0200, Joerg Sonnenberger wrote:
: > (1) Accept upper case letters in license names as discussed here.
: >     If you disagree with this, discuss it in the thread.

: I may not have mentioned this before, so I'd better send this now.
: Yes, I know that you take a great pleasure in arguing with me, but
: please stop, take a step back, and consider the ramifications.

: If you go with case-sensitive license names, then modified-bsd and
: modified-BSD are two different licenses.  As are gnu-gpl-v3 and
: gnu-GPL-v3.  It is not a good idea to do this from a usability PoV,
: since people tend to think of some license names in terms of acronyms
: (BSD, MIT, GPL), and pkgsrc seems to have persuaded itself that only
: lower case will be used internally, and death to all who oppose this.

: So I'd urge you to try to think of some of the poor sods that you are
: condemning to case-sensitivity hell, here, please.  Or even to think
: of yourself, fielding all those PRs which state "Wow, your tools do
: not do what I want them to do all because of a capital letter?".

  The end user is supposed to copy the license name from the warning
message pkg_add or make issue, or from the package Makefile.  And yes,
I think we can expect them to do so in a case sensitive manner.

  As I've said to Joerg in a mail to tech-pkg on June 16th: 

> [...]  We might expect (the few people who selectively
> (dis)allow free licenses) to comply with our casing.  We should not
> expect users to have to change their existing setup.  Allowing upper
> case but being case sensitive fulfills both points, so I'm okay with
> it.

: Or I suppose you could point them at the documentation, which
: is...  where, exactly?

  It would probably be good if the pkg_add(1) manpage and the pkgsrc
guide mentioned that license names are case-sensitive.

                                                yours,
                                                dillo