[Haskell-cafe] Copyright field vs. License file

[Joachim Breitner]

Dear package maintainers,

a lot of our LICENSE file start like tihs:

        ==> haskell-lens-4.1.2.1/LICENSE <==
        Copyright 2012-2014 Edward Kmett
        
        All rights reserved.
        ...
        
        ==> haskell-cryptocipher-0.6.2/LICENSE <==
        Copyright (c) 2010-2013 Vincent Hanquez <vincent at snarc.org>
        
        All rights reserved.
        ...
        
        ==> haskell-http-client-0.3.2.1/LICENSE <==
        The MIT License (MIT)
        
        Copyright (c) 2013 Michael Snoyman
        
        Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person
        obtaining a copy of
        ...

i.e. they mix the copyright information with the license.

I know, of course, why that is: "cabal init" prepares it that way, and
those not using cabal init probably copy it from an existing file.

A notable exception are the GPL-licensed packages; these usually don’t
have copyright information in the license.

The problem is that this information is not structured, and hard to
parse, i.e. to create license reports or (my use case) create
distribution packages with much less manual labor.

Cabal describes the fields as

        license-file: filename or license-files: filename list
        
            The name of a file(s) containing the precise copyright
        license for this package. The license file(s) will be installed
        with the package.
        
            If you have multiple license files then use the
        license-files field instead of (or in addition to) the
        license-file field.
        
        copyright: freeform
        
            The content of a copyright notice, typically the name of the
        holder of the copyright on the package and the year(s) from
        which copyright is claimed.
        For example: Copyright: (c) 2006-2007 Joe Bloggs


which suggest to put the copyright data into the cabal file only and
leave the license file alone.

It would also have the advantage that after cabal init, you’d only have
to modify one file, and the copyright information is easily visible on
hackage.


I know that there it is highly unlikely that a significant number of
maintainers will change their existing files. But I’d still like to get
feedback:

Do you agree that this make sense? Should I try to make "cabal init" set
it up this way? And would you accept pull requests for this?


Thanks,
Joachim

-- 
Joachim “nomeata” Breitner
  mail at joachim-breitner.de • http://www.joachim-breitner.de/
  Jabber: nomeata at joachim-breitner.de  • GPG-Key: 0xF0FBF51F
  Debian Developer: nomeata at debian.org

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 819 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/attachments/20140923/07dea545/attachment.sig>