[oe] LICENSE field format

[Denys Dmytriyenko]

On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 04:06:10PM -0500, Maupin, Chase wrote:
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: openembedded-devel-bounces at lists.openembedded.org
> > [mailto:openembedded-devel-bounces at lists.openembedded.org] On Behalf Of
> > Denys Dmytriyenko
> > Sent: Wednesday, October 20, 2010 3:38 PM
> > To: openembedded-devel at lists.openembedded.org
> > Subject: [oe] LICENSE field format
> > 
> > All,
> > 
> > We've had a number of discussions on the license matter recently. Trying
> > to
> > unify those brings us to the question of the LICENSE field format in
> > recipes.
> > As some projects are dual/triple licensed or use multiple licenses at the
> > same
> > time, it becomes hard to specify it all in the LICENSE field, especially
> > when
> > there are no rules defined. We do have several different formats used to
> > separate multiple licenses, which is quite confusing and doesn't make it
> > clear
> > whether licenses are AND-ed or OR-ed (I know those are not legal terms,
> > but
> > for the purpose of this discussion that's fine :)) Here are some examples:
> > 
> > LICENSE = "License1 License2"
> > LICENSE = "License1|License2"
> > LICENSE = "License1, License2"
> > LICENSE = "License1+License2"
> > LICENSE = "License1/License2"
> > 
> > LICENSE = "Very Long License Name"
> > LICENSE = "License with some exceptions"
> 
> I would vote for something along the following lines:
> 
> LICENSE = "License1|License2" 
> 	- This means the code is licensed under the terms of both licenses
> 
> LICENSE = "License1,License2"
> 	- This means the code can use either license exclusively
> 
> in the src_distribute class spaces should be replaced with "-"s.  Of course, 
> this could lead to licenses like "GPLv3+-with-GCC-RLE".
> 
> We should avoid separating licenses with "/" because that will mess up the 
> directory structure or "+" because that would be confusing when + is also 
> used to mean "or later" for some licenses like the GPL.

Chase,

I feel like those are just crutches and not the real solution to the problem. 
We should fix src_distribute class to work with the format we choose and not 
try to make the code happy by inventing workarounds in the format. In other 
words - the priority is to define a scalable, future-proof and easy to 
understand and follow format for the LICENSE field. And then make 
src_distribute class to behave accordingly - we can escape any special 
characters in there to make proper directory names, once we decide how to 
split the license field on individual items...

-- 
Denys

> > To make matters worse, src_distribute.bbclass splits the field at spaces
> > and
> > creates directories for each token. So, for the last two examples above,
> > we
> > end up with 4 directories for every license - each word is a separate
> > directory...
> > 
> > I'd like to raise this issue and start a discussion on unifying the
> > LICENSE
> > field format (and fixing src_distribute.bbclass accordingly). Would be
> > nice to
> > collect some ideas here on the maillist and/or discuss it further during
> > OEDEM
> > next week. Please feel free to comment.
> > 
> > --
> > Denys
> > 
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