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

Sean Whitton <[email protected]> Thu, 30 Apr 2026 10:35:52 +0100

Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.policy
Message-ID	<87cxzgkcxz.fsf__15535.9567886748$1777541849$gmane$org@melete.silentflame.com>

Chris Hofstaedtler [28/Apr  1:11pm +02] wrote:
> * Sean Whitton <[email protected]> [260428 12:26]:
>>Really we need to hear from the people who are trying to make the
>>minimal install of Debian small.  That's not me.
>
> I have a mild interest in keeping small installs small, but I'm
> certainly not an expert. I've however done some poking.
>
> Looking at the copyright files of packages installed by `mmdebstrap
> forky /dev/null` - IOW a set of packages that can be expected that
> every 'normal' install of Debian has (excluding container and
> embedded usecases which can and will apply hacks) - yields a few
> interesting things:
>
> 1) libc, sed have "Boost Software License - Version 1.0 - August
> 17th, 2003" in their copyright files. Adding this to common-licenses
> seems a net positive and could IMO be done immediately without any
> negative effects.
>
> 2) mawk, libunistring5 use CC-BY-SA 3.0
> These packages can be uninstalled. However curl depends on
> libunistring5, so once your install wants to talk to the Internet it
> probably has to stay.
>
> 3) nftables uses CC-BY-SA 4.0
> This package can be uninstalled, but again once you want network
> connectivity, ...
>
> 4) AGPLv3 is NOT present
>
> 5) Deduplicating copyright files might be a meaningful disk space
> saving, if we actually care about disk space savings.
> The install per above has:
>
> * 10 binary packages from src:util-linux adding 30KB copyright per binary
> * 6 binary packages from src:systemd adding 13KB copyright per binary
> * 5 binary packages from src:e2fsprogs adding 20KB copyright per binary
> * 4 binary packages from src:pam adding 10KB copyright per binary
> * 4 binary packages from src:krb5 adding 63KB copyright per binary
> ff.
>
> I haven't done a full calculation but it seems we could save 1MB in
> such an install just by deduplicating the copyright files. Someone
> else may be interested in running the same analysis on different
> install scenarios, say Live ISOs, Desktop installs, etc.
>
> With my src:util-linux maintainer hat on, I'd welcome tooling and a
> corresponding policy change towards copyright file deduplication.

Thank you for the feedback.  Seems to me we can prioritise developer
time by adding more licenses to common-licenses, then, with the possible
exception of the AGPL.

-- 
Sean Whitton

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