Bug#1135097: Bug#885698: What licenses should be included in /usr/share/common-licenses?

Sean Whitton <[email protected]> Tue, 28 Apr 2026 10:20:16 +0100

Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.policy
Message-ID	<87mrynsapb.fsf__10403.7402475782$1777368211$gmane$org@zephyr.silentflame.com>

Santiago Vila [27/Apr  3:22pm +02] wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 27, 2026 at 03:09:54PM +0200, Guillem Jover wrote:
>> On Mon, 2026-04-27 at 14:52:41 +0200, Marco d'Itri wrote:
>> > On Apr 27, Mechtilde Stehmann <[email protected]> wrote:
>> > > The issue at hand is the inclusion of additional license texts in the
>> > > base-files package.
>>
>> > I think that there was a consensus back then and there is still one now.
>> > Do you volunteer to NMU base-files, if the maintainer is not
>> > interested in working on this?
>>
>> Uh, what? I'm pretty certain Santiago would be happy to update
>> base-files *once* debian-policy has been updated, but certainly not
>> before. So instead of unnecessarily throwing shade, perhaps get
>> debian-policy updated first?
>
> Indeed.
>
> Here is a quote from base-files FAQ for those who never bothered to read it:
>
>
> Q. Why isn't license "foo" included in common-licenses?
>
> A. I delegate such decisions to the policy group. If you want to
> propose a new license you should make a policy proposal to modify the
> paragraph in policy saying "Packages distributed under the Apache
> license (version 2.0), the Artistic license, the GNU GPL (versions 1,
> 2, or 3), the GNU LGPL (versions 2, 2.1, or 3), and the GNU FDL
> (versions 1.2 or 1.3) should refer to the corresponding files under
> /usr/share/common-licenses". The way of doing this is explained in the
> debian-policy package. As usual, you should always take a look at
> already reported bugs against debian-policy before submitting a new
> one.

I'm sorry, I just posted to #1135097 stating the opposite ..

I think that the "at least 100 packages" part of this proposal is too
low a bar.  But perhaps the traditional "deduplicating it would save
disk space on the majority of Debian installations" is too high a bar.

Any thoughts on something in between?

-- 
Sean Whitton

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