> > One problem that bothers me about the current system (ignoring issues
> > about the terms of the licenses not being explicit when setting
> > ACCEPTABLE_LICENSES):
> >
> > If package A depends upon B, and both are in the same license class, then
> > I unwittingly agree to B's license when I modify my ACCEPTABLE_LICENSES to
 [...]
> How about something like this?
>
> If you want to build package foo, which has LICENSE=no-profit in its
> Makefile, just add
>
>      ACCEPTABLE_LICENSES=     foo-license
>
> to /etc/mk.conf.  Or, easier still, just do
>
>    make ACCEPTABLE_LICENSES=foo-license

...in effect accepting whatever-license-foo-requires, but ONLY making the
exception for the specific package foo, not for any other packages that
might need to be (re)built/installed in the process?

That sounds good to me.


> > While I'm rambling on, it would be nice to have the ability to get a list
> > of all <pkg>:<license> pairs for all <pkg>s installed on a given system,
> > where <license> is a pointer to the full text of the licnese.  If every
> > LICENSE= binding were uniquely associated with a specific license, one
> > could do it with sufficient post-processing of the pkg_info(8) output...
 [...]
> That would be ideal, but there are far too many licenses (and
> variations upon them) to make that possible at this stage.

Oh well.  I did make it an addendum to a ramble.  (^&  (I think that I
should have said ``...were associated with exactly one license...'', but
you seem to have grokked what I think I meant.)


> At the moment, I'm trying to make the ACCEPTABLE_LICENSES setting
> useful.
>
> Also, I intend adding LICENSE=unknown to all of the packages where
> no license could be found. (Unfortunately that applies to a lot more
> packages than I expected).

I haven't looked carefully at pkgsrc's use of LICENSE, but my impression
is that many people don't think too much about licenses.  If that's
correct, I'm not sure why people are that way (other than the fact that
licenses tend to be a bother).  I'm not too surprised that you have to do
a lot of LICENSE=unknown's.

Have fun with the license stuff.  (And good luck, if you need it.  (^&)
It sounds like something that I would appreciate seeing.


  "I probably don't know what I'm talking about." --rauch@eecs.ukans.edu