On Jul 14, 2016, at 11:13 PM, Ryan Schmidt <ryandes...@macports.org> wrote: >> I'm asking what the utility is of having a middle ground between "we know >> what this license is" and "we don't know what this license is" > > The utility is: people often submit new Portfiles in tickets in the issue > tracker and indicate "license GPL". This means we have to then ask the > submitter if they really meant any version of GPL, which is unusual and used > almost exclusively for Perl software, or whether they did not research what > version of GPL applies. If we instead decided to use "GPL-1+" to indicate > "really, any version of GPL", and a Portfile was submitted indicating > "license GPL-1+", then we would know that any version of GPL is acceptable > without having to ask, and if the submitted Portfile indicated "license GPL", > then we would know that the user failed to indicate which versions apply.
so you're really just advocating that we remove the un-versioned license shortcut totally? it's not clear to me that it's a net win (or that it's worthwhile in this case to try to engineer a solution to someone submitting something that is incorrect). Maybe lint --nitpick should emit a warning on unversioned licenses (for the ones that have versions?) >> Or, I'm arguing that if it's unclear what version of a license applies, we >> should treat it the same as not knowing what license applies. > > We currently employ the same syntax (e.g. "GPL") for indicating "any version > of this license is OK" and "somebody forgot to specify what version of this > license is OK". I'm suggesting we should adopt syntax so that we can > differentiate those two cases. No, the syntax of license GPL means "any version of the GPL". People maybe don't realize that (our documentation of license stuff and binary distribution rules probably needs to be improved). You're not going to be able to systematically know whether people are making a mistake, and knowing "person made a mistake" in the license field isn't useful to the ports system (only useful to a human reviewer who can correct the Portfile). -- Daniel J. Luke _______________________________________________ macports-dev mailing list macports-dev@lists.macosforge.org https://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo/macports-dev
