On Sat, 2008-03-01 at 10:39 +0100, Felix Martini wrote:

Right now i cannot see a reason why the cabal license field is an enumeration instead of a string. The purpose seems to be to direct people to preferred licenses of the Haskell community. If so this is the wrong approach imo.

It's not clear that that is the intention. This has been in the spec and the design since the very beginning. You'd have to ask someone who helped with the original spec to be sure of the intention. http://haskell.org/cabal/release/old/users-guide-0.1/x29.html#pkg-descr http://haskell.org/cabal/release/cabal-1.0/doc/pkg-spec-html/ It has always allowed for using any license. I suspect the intention was for convenience and to provide some consistency for common licenses, eg so we don't get packages specifying "gpl", "gpl2" "gpl-2" "GPL" and we have to wonder if those are all the same. In the common case it gives machine recognisable information. Duncan