Manoj Srivastava dijo [Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 01:57:30PM -0500]: > The question is not how many people have installed the package, > the question is how many packages on a given machine have the same > copyright, and thus would benefit by savings in disk space by bundling > them together > > This savings in diskspace is supposed to offset the fact that > the binary package alone is unusable, since it does not contain the > copyright; and that automated copyright file extractors get handed off > a pointer, not the actual copyright, which could be an issue. > > The rule of thumb I have traditionally applied is to see if 5% > of the source packages in the archive use the license under > consideration, and use that as a gating point. > > A better, though harder, test would be to poll actual > installations and see the disk saving that would result by bundling the > license, divided by the number of systems polled, but I do not know of > anyone actually conducting such a survey.
If 100% of Debian were to use the same license, we would be talking about ~22000 license text repetitions. And imagine all of them were GPL3 (the largest license in /usr/share/common-licenses) - That's 35068 bytes. Yes, that would amount to a whopping total of almost 735MB - Not at all something you can throw away, is it? Well, but even if all of Debian were mutually installable (i.e. no packages with conflicts: declared), how much space would _that_ take? I don't dare to answer, but we were recently talking about the archive size regarding CD image creation - We are at about 30 CDs now. I understand we are sticking with producing 650MB CDs and not larger images as there are still media that big - and maybe some readers which won't take larger disks? Never mind... 30 CDs is about 19500MB. We would be losing up to 4% bytes by mindlessly repeating that single license... Maybe even less, as the CDs are gzipped (they contain .debs after all). On an installed system, you say? Well, I have no data, but I guess, once uncompressed, it would not take less than 35GB. What's 730MB next to that? Oh, and how long is the HDD in this very generic machine I got about a year ago? Two-hundred-and-something GB. Of course, I'm playing with the numbers. There are still smaller machines, there are the embedded-minded people, and of course, there would be no sane way to verify the GPL3 was the same GPL3 all over if we were to kill common-licenses - But basically, I'd not base the definition in diskspace savings. -- Gunnar Wolf - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - (+52-55)5623-0154 / 1451-2244 PGP key 1024D/8BB527AF 2001-10-23 Fingerprint: 0C79 D2D1 2C4E 9CE4 5973 F800 D80E F35A 8BB5 27AF -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
