Bug 52821 – /usr/portage/licenses contain non text files.

• Product: Portage Development
• Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

[Description Octavio Ruiz (Ta^3) 2004-06-02 15:14:00 UTC]

There are no policy for contents inside usr/portage/licenses?

In order to accept a License user must read it before install, but if it's on another format (ex. pdf) you need to install ps2text or xpdf in order to read it.

There are HTML documents too, its not better have it in plain ASCII text? (same for UTF-8. Not every system is UTF-8 capable).

Maybe this bug is looking for unification in the dir /usr/portage/licenses

=====
$file /usr/portage/licenses/* | grep -v ASCII | grep -v ISO

/usr/portage/licenses/4F:                           HTML document text
/usr/portage/licenses/APSL-2:                       Macintosh Application (data): PLE PUBLIC SOURCE LICENSE
/usr/portage/licenses/CRACKLIB:                     Mathematica, or Pascal,  Modula-2 or 3 code text
/usr/portage/licenses/DSL:                          UTF-8 Unicode English text
/usr/portage/licenses/OpenSoftware:                 UTF-8 Unicode English text
/usr/portage/licenses/PoseidonCommon.pdf:           PDF document, version 1.3
/usr/portage/licenses/Q2EULA:                       data
/usr/portage/licenses/RTCW-ETEULA:                  UTF-8 Unicode English text, with very long lines
/usr/portage/licenses/lisp2wish:                    Lisp/Scheme program text
/usr/portage/licenses/modelsim:                     UTF-8 Unicode English text
/usr/portage/licenses/perforce.pdf:                 PDF document, version 1.3
/usr/portage/licenses/selfhtml:                     UTF-8 Unicode text

[Comment 1 Daniel Black (RETIRED) 2004-06-04 08:04:31 UTC]

HTML and PDF are a small bit dubious however it is how the license was presented.

Will a non UTF-8 cable machine render text totaly unreadable or just some characters?

The other formats here are text readable..

[Comment 2 Stefan Jones (RETIRED) 2004-06-04 09:03:00 UTC]

/usr/portage/licenses/OpenSoftware:
just contains two bytes which are not ASCII, <C2><A7>.
gedit displays a valid charater.

I guess this is a common occourance, mostly to do with the UTF coding of the copyright charater.

[Comment 3 Stuart Herbert (RETIRED) 2004-06-04 11:39:15 UTC]

Hiya,

Unless the copyright holder explicitly grants us permission to convert the file, we have to store the license file in whatever format it was originally published in.  Without that permission, we are breaking US and international copyright law.

The Perforce license is only published as a PDF file.

Imagine that Perforce wasn't in Portage, and that you had to install it for yourself manually.  You would have to go to their website and read the PDF file before downloading their software.

So, having the PDF file in Portage doesn't change what software you would have to have installed on your machine anyway.

I agree - plain text files are the best, and should always be used when they are available.  But sometimes they are not, and when that happens, I don't think they cause a problem.

Best regards,
Stu

[Comment 4 Daniel Black (RETIRED) 2004-06-04 16:16:02 UTC]

Well put Stu.