[OE-core] LICENSE for recipes with empty SRC_URI

[Richard Purdie]

On Fri, 2018-06-29 at 19:56 -0700, Andre McCurdy wrote:
> There doesn't seem to be much consistency in the way LICENSE is
> handled for recipes which don't need to define anything in SRC_URI.
> 
>  - Packagegroup recipes have a default LICENSE in
> packagegroup.bbclass
> and generally don't define their own value, for reasons explained in:
> 
>   http://git.openembedded.org/openembedded-core/commit/?id=c04ae17f43
> 9ffd5fd70d8564430a94582e2cf688
> 
>  - Image recipes have a default LICENSE in image.bbclass but
> generally
> always explicitly define the value again. A precedent for doing that
> seems to have been set by:
> 
>   http://git.openembedded.org/openembedded-
> core/commit/?id=fb617bed6ebbb17ca9a14ea5985302b03311ccb7

That is from 2010 and the world looked very different so I'm not sure
I'd read much into it.

>  - SDK recipes (anything inheriting populate_sdk) don't have a
> default
> LICENSE and must explicitly define one in each recipe.
> 
> Given that LICENSE is meant to apply to the sources associated with a
> recipe, not the recipe itself, shouldn't all these cases be following
> the approach currently taken by packagegroup recipes (ie a default
> set
> by the appropriate class and no LICENSE in the recipe)? Or is there a
> fundamental difference between these cases which justifies the three
> different approaches?

I think the approach should be standardised and come from the class.
The recipe can always override.

I suspect its simply not happened as nobody has had time or there have
been other higher priorities.

Cheers,

Richard