[Nix-dev] meta.license

[Ramakrishnan Muthukrishnan]

Hi,

I am only ~3-4 days into nixpkg development at this point (and really
like it). I am also a Debian Developer (since ~2001) and in Debian land,
we take licenses very seriously. 

Is there some to specify a custom license? Reason why I ask is this: I
had been looking at plan9port, which I use on all my machines, off late.
I have some fixes in a pull request at the moment. plan9port nix
expression file specifies meta.license="free". In reality it is a bit
complicated [1]. Part of it is BSD-like and some of the fonts have a
slightly different license notice [2].

How do we go about specifying these license? I would like to propose
this and work towards a patch to achieve it:

Create a meta.license value called "custom" and an optional
meta.licenseFiles attribute (I am not sure if I am using these terms
properly in the nix context, please correct me if I am wrong) that point
to a list of files that specify the various license notices used by the
various source files. Does this sound fine?

[1] http://swtch.com/usr/local/plan9/LICENSE
[2] http://swtch.com/usr/local/plan9/font/luc/NOTICE
-- 
  Ramakrishnan Muthukrishnan