[Haskell-cafe] Hackage suggestion: Gather the list of the licenses of all dependencies of a package

[Henk-Jan van Tuyl]

On Thu, 13 Dec 2012 11:41:14 +0100, Petr P <petr.mvd at gmail.com> wrote:

> For each package, gather the list
> of the licenses of everything it depends on. I think this would help
> considerably people who don't want or can't use software licensed under a
> particular license (most often (L)GPL). In particular, we can have a BSD
> package that depends on a LGPL package, and this is fine for FOSS
> developers. But for a commercial developer, this can be a serious issue
> that is not apparent until one examines *every* transitive dependency.
>
> This idea is a bit vague, because a dependency is actually a range of
> packages, which in theory could have different licenses. But I suppose  
> this
> will rarely happen in practice, so it'd be safe just to take the last
> package in the range (or maybe take all licences of the packages in the
> range).


cab[0] can do that, for installed packages:
   cab deps -i -r -a vector
will generate a list of licenses for the packages that vector depends  
upon, like this:

base 4.3.1.0 BSD3 ""
     ghc-prim 0.2.0.0 BSD3 ""
         rts 1.0 BSD3 ""
             ffi 1.0 BSD3 ""
     integer-gmp 0.2.0.3 BSD3 ""
         ghc-prim 0.2.0.0 BSD3 ""
             rts 1.0 BSD3 ""
                 ffi 1.0 BSD3 ""
     rts 1.0 BSD3 ""
         ffi 1.0 BSD3 ""
primitive 0.4.0.1 BSD3 "Roman Leshchinskiy <rl at cse.unsw.edu.au>"
     base 4.3.1.0 BSD3 ""
         ghc-prim 0.2.0.0 BSD3 ""
             rts 1.0 BSD3 ""
                 ffi 1.0 BSD3 ""
         integer-gmp 0.2.0.3 BSD3 ""
             ghc-prim 0.2.0.0 BSD3 ""
                 rts 1.0 BSD3 ""
                     ffi 1.0 BSD3 ""
         rts 1.0 BSD3 ""
             ffi 1.0 BSD3 ""
     ghc-prim 0.2.0.0 BSD3 ""
         rts 1.0 BSD3 ""
             ffi 1.0 BSD3 ""


Regards,
Henk-Jan van Tuyl

[0] http://hackage.haskell.org/package/cab


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