Re: [gentoo-dev] RFC: license group file format

[Marius Mauch]

On Thu, 26 Oct 2006 21:43:56 +0200
Marius Mauch <genone@g.o> wrote:

> On Thu, 26 Oct 2006 12:50:01 -0500
> Grant Goodyear <g2boojum@g.o> wrote:
>
> > Marius Mauch wrote: [Thu Oct 26 2006, 12:02:59PM CDT]
> > > Ok, as there is currently a lot of work going on for GLEP 23
> > > (licese based visibility filtering aka ACCEPT_LICENSE) the topic
> > > of license groups came up, in particular the way how they should
> > > be (technically) defined.
> > >
> > > The simplest way is a line based format
> > > 	<groupname> <license1> ... <licenseN>
> >
> > At the risk of reopening a large can of worms, can somebody explain
> > to me why the license groups idea won't run into the same conceptual
> > issues that derailed GLEP 29 (USE groups)?  Am I missing something
> > obvious?
>
> Maybe my memory is wrong, but wasn't the problem only that people
> couldn't agree on one set of semantics for negations and being afraid
> of confusing users? In that case I don't see a big problem as long as
> the semantics are clearly defined, as most users will probably stick
> with just one predefined group (if they use this feature at all)
> adjusted by a few handpicked licenses.

Little discussion in #gentoo-portage resulted in the conclusion that
license groups may only contain positive elements, and negating a
license group will negate all elements contained in it. This avoids the
nasty problem of double negation that was IIRC one of the killers for
GLEP 29.

Marius

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