Re: licenses as packages

[Alistair Crooks <agc%pkgsrc.org@localhost>]

On Mon, May 21, 2012 at 10:29:17PM +0200, Jan Danielsson wrote:
>    Did anyone ever consider making licenses into packages? (Analogous to
> the unix philosophy "everything is a file", from pkgsrc's perspective it
> would be something along the line of "everything is a package").

wrt everything is a package - I think there has to be some minimal
infrastructure which allows you to get the tools in place.  Now that's
not to say that the infrastructure can't be upgraded by installing an
infrastructure package - but no-one's had the idea before, and I
suspect there may be some bootstrap corner case issues lurking, such
that they're difficult to find, and even harder to debug.  So we
haven't gone there in the past.

>    # cd /usr/pkgsrc/blah/gfoo
>    # make
>    [.. error about licenses/gpl2 not being installed ..]
>    # cd /usr/pkgsrc/licenses/gpl2
>    # make package-install
>    # cd /usr/pkgsrc/blah/gfoo
>    # make
>    [.. success! ..]
> 
> 
>    # date +%F
>    2013-05-01
>    # pkg_add firefox-781.0.tgz
>    Missing mozilla-license.
>    # pkg_add mozilla-license.tgz
>    # pkg_add firefox-781.0.tgz
> 
> 
>    So licenses would essentially be dependencies which aren't
> automatically built/traversed.
> 
>    I don't really see any benefits to this, and I'm not seriously
> suggesting pkgsrc move in that direction. I'm just curious if it was
> ever considered, and if there are any reasons it wouldn't work in
> theory. (Apart from the long line of general annoyances it would create).

Well, no, it wasn't considered when they were added.  It's been a
while now, but the thinking was along the lines of "the licenses are
part of the infrastructure", and "you really need to see what the
license is before you can decide to download the distfile".

As to whether it would be useful now? I suspect that the parts that are
hardcoded in pkg_install are working against us here.

Reagrds,
Alistair