Re: Usage of %license tag when the license text is in a readme

Stephen Gallagher <sgallagh@xxxxxxxxxx> · Thu, 17 Dec 2015 14:11:30 -0500

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On 12/17/2015 08:21 AM, Itamar wrote:
> 
> 
> On 12/17/2015 11:04 AM, Stephen Gallagher wrote:
>> On 12/17/2015 07:30 AM, Matthew Miller wrote:
>>> On Thu, Dec 17, 2015 at 10:53:09AM +0000, Mat Booth wrote:
>>>>> 1) add readme file only to %doc 2) add readme file only to 
>>>>> %license 3) add readme to both %doc and %license 4) cut
>>>>> file in two parts
>>>> Actually I don't mind options 1, 2 or 3 (all of these
>>>> options fulfil the legal obligations of the license, right?)
>>>> -- 4 seems like unnecessary effort for no real gain.
>> 
>>> Don't forget the "nodocs" use case, which the separate license
>>> tag helps cover. That means 2 or 3 is preferable to 1. My
>>> suggestion would be to go with 3 and then to ask upstream to
>>> separate it out. Ideally, if they're using a standard license,
>>> we can in the future deduplicate identical license files, too,
>>> but only if they're just the license alone in a file.
>> 
>> Just to clarify, Option 1 would not in fact be legally acceptable
>> in many cases (because installation with --nodocs could then
>> result in an installation that did not meet license requirements
>> of having the text present on the installed system).
>> 
> this macro is documented under packaging for epel wiki
> 
> %{!?_licensedir:%global license %doc}
> 

EPEL is a special case, it doesn't have the necessary distinguishing
features in RPM to do %license. So on those platforms (to make
maintenance of spec files easier) it's just an alias to %doc.