Hi
If we'd had better foresight we would never have added BSD4 and could then have claimed that "BSD" covered both the 2 and 3 clause versions. We're not trying to nail down every last nuance in the licenses (e.g. I don't think we need to be trying to distinguish GPL-2 from GPL-2+).
Sorry, as a debian maintainer I think you really do need to care about this if you are interested in making cabal packages easily converted into Debian packages.
The Debian project (and therefore also Ubuntu) are real sticklers for getting the copyright terms correct and making them well known. They go to great lengths to distinguish between GPL2, GPL2plus and GPL3.
Now if cabal only listed BSD, GPL and LGPL then it would fall to people getting the LICENSE files right.
How do people modify the LICENSE file to indicate their GPL2/GPL2plus intention? From what I can see, the LICENSE file is the GPL2, and you need to say how it applies to your code - that's not something for the LICENSE file itself, but for the package metadata. Does Debian have some standard wording that applies this? I also want to know whether all the other Haskell GPL stuff is GPL2 or GPL2+ - since I might as well follow the crowd. I'll ask Malcolm :-) Thanks, Neil