Subject: [RFC] Where to put license files?
To: NetBSD Packages Technical Discussion List <tech-pkg@NetBSD.org>
From: Roland Illig <rillig@NetBSD.org>
List: tech-pkg
Date: 09/28/2005 20:45:24
Hi,

the licenses/ directory currently holds all kinds of software licenses. 
Some of them aren't used at all in pkgsrc, while other packages have 
licenses that aren't listed in this directory.

To improve the situation, I suggest that single-package licenses are 
installed in their package directory. For example, 
fprot-workstation-license should be 
security/fprot-workstation/bin/LICENSE, as this is the only package 
using this license.

The corresponding Makefile might then look like this:

LICENSE=        fprot-workstation-license
LICENSE_FILE=   LICENSE

The LICENSE is the unique name of the license, for use in 
ACCEPTABLE_LICENSES (nothing changes here). The only thing that changes 
is that the license file is not required to be in the licenses/ 
directory, but can be placed anywhere in the pkgsrc tree.

This change would allow add-on categories like pkgsrc-wip to have 
packages with LICENSE, too.

Roland