On Fri, Dec 24, 2021 at 10:05:26AM +0100, Miro Hrončok wrote:
> > %license LICENSE.txt
>might still be needed—under the theory that the license file is
>supposed to be installed in /usr/share/licenses.
This assumption is not true. I even recall asking somewhere wrt
Python's license file:
[...]
>The Licensing Guidelines simply say that %license must be used,
>and don’t mention /usr/share/licenses[2].
Since the license tag is My Fault™, and it was a long time ago, some
background just for the sake of keeping our collective memory refreshed, the
main purpose of the %license tag as distinct from %doc is to make sure that
when packages are installed without docs (possibly in containers or other
minimal-footprint situations), the license is still included, as many of
them require that.
As a bonus, we could theoretically change the behavior to de-dupe, or even
do complicated things like only install the license files which require it
when nodoc is used. That's not generally been worth bothering, but I do
notice that /usr/share/license takes up 44MB on my desktop system, so...
there's room to shrink. (Using jdupes, I found this is 13.32MiB "exclusive"
with btrfs.)
For reference:
https://pagure.io/packaging-committee/issue/411
--
Matthew Miller
<mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org>
Fedora Project Leader