Re: [gentoo-dev] Installing COPYING or LICENSE files

[Petteri Räty]

Drake Wyrm wrote:
> Petteri R??ty <betelgeuse@g.o> wrote:
>
>>Petteri R??ty wrote:
>>
>>>R Hill wrote:
>>>
>>>>Daniel Ahlberg wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>* if ebuild installs COPYING and/or INSTALL into doc.
>>>>
>>>>Is this actually important?  There are a hell of a lot of ebuilds that fail
>>>>under this rule.  I'd like to start filing patches for some of the packages in
>>>>this list so I'm interested in knowing what's worth fixing and what's being
>>>>pedantic.
>>>
>>>Not a blocker but just useless. Filing patches for ebuilds doing this is
>>>greatly appreciated by at least me.
>>
>>https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=113680
>>
>>So is there a policy about [not] installing the COPYING or LICENSE files
>>already? If there isn't one, I propose we make a decision about this to
>>have uniform behaviour across the tree.
>
>
> You're going to be hard-pressed to get any kind of consensus on this
> issue. Many dev seems to feel that the license belongs there. In some
> cases the COPYING, LICENSE, and/or INSTALL files contain, not boilerplate
> drivel, but actually unique, useful information.
>
> Certainly there could be value in leaving out _yet_another_ copy of the
> GPL and the banal INSTALL, but even that wouldn't justify a universal
> ban on certain file names.
>

I am not out to ban certain file names. Just for example the copies of
GPL-2 or the general INSTALL file. If the file does contain useful
information I am all for installing it. It's just that usually the
INSTALL file is not really useful unless you are manually installing the
package from sources and then you will have the INSTALL file in there
with the sources.

Regards,
Petteri