Re: What licenses should be included in /usr/share/common-licenses?

Timo Röhling <[email protected]> Tue, 28 Apr 2026 21:55:03 +0200

Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.general
Organization	The Debian Project
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

Hi,

* Andrea Pappacoda <[email protected]> [2026-04-28 20:55]:
>>>We could even adopt the SPDX-License-Identifier: syntax.
>>
>>I don't think that would be appropriate: SPDX-License-Identifier 
>>normally means "the license of the file where this marker appears is 
>>the named license", but in d/copyright the meaning we want is "the 
>>license of some other file is the named license".

The REUSE 3.3 specification uses SPDX-License-Identifier in its TOML 
annotation file format, their d/copyright analog, so there is prior art.
However,

>"License" is easier to write.

That argument is hard to beat when we want to reduce boilerplate. ;)

I initially thought that it might be helpful if maintainers signalled 
their intention to use (only) valid SPDX identifiers. Unless we 
anticipate the need to support more than one licensing naming scheme, we 
can achieve that just as easily by bumping the file format version, 
though.


Cheers
Timo


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