[OE-core] [PATCH 0/1] Additional license wrangling functionality

[Cliff Brake]

Many thanks for implementing these improvements!

The manifest file for core-image-minimal is attached.

A few thoughts after testing this ...

I like the way the license information is being cleaned up in the recipes.

In the past, I have collected licenses by using the following
procedure directly on a device:

cd /usr/lib/opkg/info
grep License *

In the past (OE Classic build from a year ago or so), the Control file
in a packaged looked like:

Package: libc6
Version: 2.9-r37.3.6
Description: GNU C Library
Section: libs
Priority: required
Maintainer: Angstrom Developers <angstrom-distro-devel at linuxtogo.org>
License: LGPL
Architecture: armv5te
OE: glibc
Homepage: http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/libc.html
Depends: update-rc.d, libcidn1
Source: ...

Now, in OE core they look like this:

Package: libc6
Version: 2.13-r6+svnr14157
Description: Embedded GLIBC (GNU C Library)
 Embedded GLIBC (EGLIBC) is a variant of the GNU C Library (GLIBC) that is
 designed to work well on embedded systems. EGLIBC strives to be source
 and binary compatible with GLIBC. EGLIBC's goals include reduced
 footprint, configurable components, better support for cross-compilation
 and cross-testing.
Section: libs
Priority: optional
Maintainer: OE-Core Developers <openembedded-core at lists.openembedded.org>
Architecture: i586
OE: eglibc
Homepage: http://www.eglibc.org/home
Provides: glibc
Source:  ...

Why is the License field no longer included in the control file?

One of the biggest issues with the current license mechanism is the
license directory seems to only populated at recipe build time, not at
image rootfs generation.  Therefore, you have to do a clean build to
get a list of licenses.  It seems like it would be more optimal if the
License information was stored in the packages (as it was in the
past), and then extracted from each package during the rootfs phase.
The license manifest could then be created similar to the way the
testlab stuff is done in OE:

http://cgit.openembedded.org/cgit.cgi/meta-openembedded/tree/meta-oe/classes/testlab.bbclass

As a side note, I find the testlab information very useful, so perhaps
it should be considered for including in oe-core.

I'm also not convinced that license information for every package is
being shown in the manifest.  For example, during the rootfs phase, I
see things like:

Installing kernel-module-cfbcopyarea
Installing kernel-module-uvesafb

But I don't see anything offhand in the manifests file that would
correlate to the above kernel modules.  So in summary, there are two
possible improvements that I think would be useful:

1) make sure license information for _every_ package that gets
installed at the rootfs phase is included in the report.  If there is
not License information, perhaps this should be a fatal error.

2) be able to generate the report at rootfs time, not recipe build time.

3) put the License field back into the package Control file, so any
tool that generates an image from packages can use this.

Thanks,
Cliff

-- 
=================
http://bec-systems.com


On Mon, Jul 11, 2011 at 7:11 PM, Flanagan, Elizabeth
<elizabeth.flanagan at intel.com> wrote:
> Requested by a member of the community, this fixes a few issues with license
> wrangling. Specifically,
>
> - licenses are now wrangled into:
>  ${DEPLOY_DIR}/licenses/${IMAGE_NAME}/datetimestamp
>  This keeps multiple runs of a build from polluting the licenses of a
> previous build
> - remove all wrangling of -native and -cross licenses:
>  if it's not on the image, then having the license isn't useful and
> in fact, is harmful
> - create a manifest
>  on BuildCompleted we take all the wrangled licenses and give a
> manifest with all the
>  *known* common licenses. If license.bbclass doesn't know the common, we don't
>  include it.
> - Since we have + licenses, we can now deal with them correctly.
>
> The following changes since commit 2c79c9eb7ef8ef0aef8c3096c3c4387e28e56ea2:
>
>  pulseaudio: add 0.9.23 (2011-07-07 13:45:32 +0100)
>
> are available in the git repository at:
>  git://git.pokylinux.org/poky-contrib eflanagan/license_pn
>  http://git.pokylinux.org/cgit.cgi/poky-contrib/log/?h=eflanagan/license_pn
>
> Beth Flanagan (1):
>  license.bbclass: License Manifests and more.
>
>  meta/classes/license.bbclass |  179 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++--------------
>  1 files changed, 120 insertions(+), 59 deletions(-)
>
> _______________________________________________
> Openembedded-core mailing list
> Openembedded-core at lists.openembedded.org
> http://lists.linuxtogo.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openembedded-core
>
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