packaging catalogs and license questions

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Sun, Mar 17, 2013 at 01:16:38PM +0100, Mattia Verga wrote:
> Hello,
> I would like to package some additional catalogs for Skychart, but I
> have some questions regarding license and to the package process.
> 
> First of all, as you can see on skychart download page [1], each
> package has more than one catalog inside. All of these catalogs are
> known to be public domain, but there's no license file specified
> either in catalogs or on original websites of the catalogs [2] [3].
> Moreover, original catalog data is reworked by skychart's developer
> to fit the main program.
> So, questions about license: Should I ask for a license file to be
> integrated? Who I should ask for the license file, skychart's
> developer or who make the original catalog data?

This should really go to the legal list:

https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/legal

> Now the technical questions. I suppose I must create new packages
> and requesting reviews for each catalog source instead of creating
> subpackages inside the main skychart specfile, right? For example,
> skychart-data-stars.spec will have stars catalogs and
> skychart-data-dso.spec will have dso catalogs, like on the
> skychart's website?
> But what if inside the stars catalogs package two catalogs have
> different licenses?I must create different subpackages, right?

Packaging questions are OK here, but they could also go on the
packaging list:

https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/packaging

I will say that I don't know why you'd want to package these
separately.  It's more work for you and more work for reviewers.  Why
don't you just make them subpackages of the main skychart package?

You can list multiple licenses in the License line, like:

  License: GPLv2+ and Public Domain and ...

> Final question. Since all these catalogs contain only data that only
> requires to be copied in the appropriate directory, there's no need
> to build anything. Can the specfile have a void %build section?

Yup.  And have an %install which copies everything into the right
place under $RPM_BUILD_ROOT.  It'd be something like:

%build
# nothing

%install
mkdir -p $RPM_BUILD_ROOT%{_datadir}/%{name}
install -m 0644 data files ... $RPM_BUILD_ROOT%{_datadir}/%{name}/

Rich.

> ...well, quite a lot of questions! ;-) I hope someone can clarify me
> on this...
> Mattia
> 
> [1] http://www.ap-i.net/skychart/en/download
> [2] http://ad.usno.navy.mil/wds/
> [3] http://www.astro.ku.dk/~erik/Tycho-2/
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