[Haskell-cafe] how can we fix our license?

[Daniel Gröber]

Hi,

On Mon, Apr 27, 2020 at 11:15:46AM +0200, Ben Franksen wrote:
> After uploading a new release i found that this and all our earlier
> release show on hackage as "GPL-2.0-only". What we have in our
> darcs.cabal is "GPL-2". This was always intended to mean "or later".

This is an unfortunate artifact of Cabal's overly careful translation of
old-style licenses to SPDX ones on Hackage server. I've also been annoyed
by this in the past and did some investigating but IIRC there just isn't
any way to fix it on the server side at this point.

> I wanted to fix this and upload a new release that uses the new variant
> "GPL-2.0-or-later" that I read about in the docs. But this isn't
> accepted by hackage. [...]
>
> Note we have
>
> cabal-version: 1.24
>
> in the cabal file, otherwise we could not support older ghc versions (we
> currently support ghc-8.0 and later).

Yup and that's your problem, there just is no way to specify the new SPDX
license id without upping your cabal-version, I don't remember what version
that was introduced in though.

Note that while a higher cabal-version does mean the user has to build with
a more recent Cabal that's usually fine since even recent Cabal release'
support for older GHC versions goes quite a ways back. It does mean they
have to upgrade their cabal-install though.

--Daniel