[Fedora-packaging] questions about license file migration

[Matthew Miller]

On Sat, Feb 28, 2015 at 04:38:16PM +0100, Björn Persson wrote:
> 2: When a package has a list of authors separate from the license file,
> should that list also be tagged as a license file, or is it considered
> regular documentation? It seems to me that *who* gives out a license is
> important information that belongs together with the license.

With a big "I'm not Fedora Legal" disclaimer, I think the answer here
is really... it depends.

The intent here is primarily to make it possible to exclude bulky
documentation for containers and other space-constrained installations
while keeping legally-required license statements in place. Authorship
files may or may not be part of that.

A second benefit is deduplicating license files themselves, which is
very minor for _space_ but might be useful in determining slight
variations in licenses — either intentional or accidental (or just
things like "FSF address changed again"). This seems very unlikely to
apply to AUTHORS files.


-- 
Matthew Miller
<mattdm at fedoraproject.org>
Fedora Project Leader