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

On Tue, Apr 28, 2026 at 09:29:56AM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
[..]
> 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.)

It might be sensible to have policy allow for this, and thus require 
that no packages *use* these files during their normal operation 
(and also not in maintscripts, etc).

Except maybe for tools explicitly designed to operate on them (say, 
license checkers, devscripts). I hope there is pre-established 
wording in policy that could be reused for such an exception.

Chris