Re: licenses as packages

[Jens Rehsack <rehsack%googlemail.com@localhost>]

On 22.05.2012 09:04, Jörn Clausen wrote:
> On Mon, May 21, 2012 at 10:29 PM, Jan Danielsson
> <jan.m.danielsson%gmail.com@localhost> 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").
> 
> How would you describe the dependency of e.g. lang/gcc to license/gpl?
> The normal pkgsrc behaviour would be to install dependencies
> automatically. This is contrary to the idea of explicitly accepting
> licenses.

That's easy from my point of view. There're 2 kinds of licenses from
pkgsrc perspective - default acceptable and those who not ;)

Creating a license package should silently install all acceptable
packages (default or overwritten by package builder) and should require
either an agreement on license conditions for any other.

Those agreement can be get in several ways:
- interactive
- pkg_add switch (needs implementer, probably Jan is a good choice)
- environment variable
...

> I don't know if pkgsrc currently has a mechanism to express
> "I depend on that package, but I won't install it for you". So you'll
> need some mechanism in license/gpl to block its installation until you
> accept it. IMHO, all in all this does not gain very much compared to
> the current situation.

Having a choice to accept/reject license is a very great feature - I'm
glad if the idea finds volunteers.

/Jens