[Nix-dev] environment.allowedLicenses ?

[Eelco Dolstra]

Hi,

On 26/01/15 14:19, Matthias Beyer wrote:

> On 26-01-2015 14:00:10, Eelco Dolstra wrote:
>> Hm, I have the impression the license checking code is becoming pretty heavy at
>> this point. For instance, what (realistically) is the use case for whitelisting?
> 
> Whitelisting a non-free license.

Doesn't that also require whitelisting all free licenses used by a configuration?

>> I actually think we should *remove* meta.license entirely (because it doesn't
>> provide useful info to users and tends to be wrong or incomplete anyway), and
>> replace it with attributes that have operational meaning:
> 
> I'm heavily against this. Having the license in the package
> information is (IMHO) the right way to do this.
> 
> Removing the license of a package is removing information about the
> package, which I do not consider a good idea at all. You could remove
> the maintainer and version, too, if you remove the license.

Well, those have an actionable meaning (namely, who to contact regarding
problems in the package, and whether "nix-env -u" should consider a package
newer). OTOH, most users don't care whether a package is licensed under the
3-clause or 2-clause BSD license.

People who do care about the exact license of a package should use a tool like
Ninka do extract the actual license, rather than depend on meta.license (since,
as I said, it tends to be incomplete or wrong).

-- 
Eelco Dolstra | LogicBlox, Inc. | http://nixos.org/~eelco/