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

Santiago Vila <[email protected]> writes:

> The base-files package has not had any new license added in a lot of
> years, while the rest of the system has continued to grow exponentially,
> as usual. Note that I'm using the word "exponentially" here in the pure
> mathematical sense, not in the English sense that "it grows too much".

> Most licenses are not really large files by today's standards.

> To be consistent, compressing licenses would force all references to
> be changed to the compressed version, IMO for very little gain.

> I'm more concerned about people copying and pasting the same licenses
> over and over again into debian/copyright, as pointed out by Mechtilde.

> Therefore, please do not worry about the increased size in the
> installed size of base-files after this proposal is approved.
> I think we definitely can afford it.

Yeah, I agree with this position. I think license texts are small even by
the standards of embedded systems these days. Disk space growth has
continued since previous rounds of this discussion, human time is more
valuable than a few extra bytes of disk consumption, and we're talking
about on the order of 1MiB at most (I suspect less than that). Compared to
the size of the Debian base image, this is very small.

Folks who actively work on embedded Debian should of course feel free to
correct me, but my recollection of past discussions is that they had
roughly the same position.

I think even in the worst case scenario of a system with a ton of Debian
chroots, the incremental size here is highly unlikely to be a significant
factor compared to, e.g., normal growth in the size of the utilities in
the base image. And of course the local system administrator can always
rm -r /usr/share/common-licenses if they really want to. (I doubt anything
important uses files there at runtime.)