On Sat, Sep 21, 2019 at 1:58 PM Ulrich Mueller <u...@gentoo.org> wrote: > > >>>>> On Sat, 21 Sep 2019, Michał Górny wrote: > > > I'd like to propose to employ a more systematic method of resolving this > > problem. I would like to add additional explicit 'GPL-n-only' licenses, > > and discourage using short 'GPL-n' in favor of them. The end result > > would be three licenses per every version/variant, e.g.: > > > GPL-2-only -- version 2 only > > GPL-2+ -- version 2 or newer > > GPL-2 -- might be either, audit necessary > > To elaborate a bit more on this: "GPL-2" already has that well defined > meaning that your proposed "GPL-2-only" has, namely that the package is > licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 2.
We are all aware. But the point is to explicitly put "-only" in the LICENSE metadata so that ebuild authors are less likely to confuse GPL-2 vs GPL-2+. > Presumably, your change would cause a long transition time, in which we > would have *three* variants for every GPL version (as well as LGPL, > AGPL, FDL), two of them with identical meaning. And after the transition > time, we would have "GPL-2-only" instead of "GPL-2", which is not only > longer but also not accurate. Sure, but who cares about a long transition time? We still have EAPI=0 ebuilds in tree -- and that's okay since we can quickly and easily tell what hasn't been transitioned! > Plus, it would result in paradoxical entries like "|| ( GPL-2-only > GPL-3-only )" for a package that can be distributed under GPL versions 2 > or 3 but no later version. That paradoxical entry is pretty clear to me. > If the goal of this exercise is to do an audit of ebuilds labelled as > "GPL-2", then a less intrusive approach (which I had already suggested > when this issue had last been discussed) would be to add a comment to > the LICENSE line, either saying "# GPL-2 only" for packages that have > been verified. Or the other way aroung, starting with a comment saying > that it is undecided, which would be removed after an audit. This would It's not a one-time audit. Michał has a history of fixing things in ways that does not allow the issue to return. I imagine that's what he's doing here, and it would not surprise me at all if something could be wired into CI to help ensure this. > have the advantage not to confuse users, and have no impact on their > ACCEPT_LICENSE settings. (For example, some people exclude AGPL and > would have to add entries for AGPL-3-only.) Trivial concern solved with a news item.
