Dear package maintainers,
a lot of our LICENSE file start like tihs:
==> haskell-lens-4.1.2.1/LICENSE <==
Copyright 2012-2014 Edward Kmett
All rights reserved.
...
==> haskell-cryptocipher-0.6.2/LICENSE <==
Copyright (c) 2010-2013 Vincent Hanquez
All rights reserved.
...
==> haskell-http-client-0.3.2.1/LICENSE <==
The MIT License (MIT)
Copyright (c) 2013 Michael Snoyman
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person
obtaining a copy of
...
i.e. they mix the copyright information with the license.
I know, of course, why that is: "cabal init" prepares it that way, and
those not using cabal init probably copy it from an existing file.
A notable exception are the GPL-licensed packages; these usually don’t
have copyright information in the license.
The problem is that this information is not structured, and hard to
parse, i.e. to create license reports or (my use case) create
distribution packages with much less manual labor.
Cabal describes the fields as
license-file: filename or license-files: filename list
The name of a file(s) containing the precise copyright
license for this package. The license file(s) will be installed
with the package.
If you have multiple license files then use the
license-files field instead of (or in addition to) the
license-file field.
copyright: freeform
The content of a copyright notice, typically the name of the
holder of the copyright on the package and the year(s) from
which copyright is claimed.
For example: Copyright: (c) 2006-2007 Joe Bloggs
which suggest to put the copyright data into the cabal file only and
leave the license file alone.
It would also have the advantage that after cabal init, you’d only have
to modify one file, and the copyright information is easily visible on
hackage.
I know that there it is highly unlikely that a significant number of
maintainers will change their existing files. But I’d still like to get
feedback:
Do you agree that this make sense? Should I try to make "cabal init" set
it up this way? And would you accept pull requests for this?
Thanks,
Joachim
--
Joachim “nomeata” Breitner
mail@joachim-breitner.de • http://www.joachim-breitner.de/
Jabber: nomeata@joachim-breitner.de • GPG-Key: 0xF0FBF51F
Debian Developer: nomeata@debian.org
