It occurred to me that Roland Illig wrote in gmane.os.netbsd.devel.packages:
> Hi,
>
> the licenses/ directory currently holds all kinds of software licenses. 
> Some of them aren't used at all in pkgsrc,

Wouldn't it be possible to scan for this? pkglint does more complex 
things, if you ask me.

> while other packages have licenses that aren't listed in this directory.

So they're being treated as having a general open source license? Isn't
the package at err in that case, no matter what mechanism we use? 

> 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.

I see one problem with this: How will several, seperate, instances of the
same license be prevented? Suppose package A uses the foobar-license.
Considering that the package maintainer didn't see anything like that
in licenses/, he'll just go ahead and add it to the local package dir. Some
time later, package B comes along, using the same license. How will we
prevent the package maintainer of package B from doing exactly the same
as A did?

I'm a bit worried about having several instances of the same licence scattered
around the place, possibly even using different versions.

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

That'd be a bonus, though - wouldn't it be possible to have a wip/licences
directory for wip-packages? Once they get "admitted" to The Real Thing,
their license file could move, too.

I see some benefits of your scheme, but  I'm not sure the end result
will be cleaner.

Just my few cents,

Martijn