[Haskell-cafe] Copyright field vs. License file

[Roman Cheplyaka]

It's not just cabal init; the copyright information traditionally is
part of the BSD and MIT license templates.

On 23/09/14 11:16, Joachim Breitner wrote:
> 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


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