[tex-live] license info in tpm file

[Frank Küster]

Norbert Preining <preining at logic.at> wrote:

> This is what I want to do: As the tpm files are installed and it
> hopefully will soon contain the license information from the catalogue,
> everybody can look up which file belongs to which license.
>
> For texlive with more than 1000 different packages it would be
> impossible to do this by hand.

Indeed - but it should be done automatically by a script.  In principle,
looking at debian/copyright should be sufficient for any Debian package
to know the license of each of its files, see #218105 and many other
remarks; and also the practical problems we have with finding "Uups,
this file is in package A, but doesn't seem to be covered by the license
of package A".

On the other hand, it is clear that even for teTeX a simple flat list is
completely unuseable, no matter how the list is grouped.  Let alone for
tex-live.  So we need some manageably format;  I started with a list of
packages, grouped by license, and a separate file indicating which file
belonged to a package (grouped by package).  If the thing is automated,
we could do it more readable:  A short plain-text copyright file
referring to the actual file in html or similar; in this case each
package could also have a link to the place where the license is
indicated (if it is in the header of each file, to one of them).

Regards, Frank


BTW, I may have asked it before, but forgot:  the texlive repository is
populated with already processed sty and cls files, not by copying dtx
and ins and running latex over the ins, right?
-- 
Frank Küster
Inst. f. Biochemie der Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer