[Buildroot] Some legal-info observations/problems

[Thomas Petazzoni]

Dear Ryan Barnett,

On Fri, 4 Oct 2013 10:30:36 -0500, Ryan Barnett wrote:

> What if the license files are only available from a website?
> 
> For example, I'm looking to add a new package, tornado (python webserver)
> to buildroot- http://www.tornadoweb.org/en/stable/ . However the license
> isn't apart of the distribution itself but it points me to a website for
> the license.
> 
> http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html
> 
> Would we then put N/A for the license file? Or how do we want to handle 
> this?
> 
> This is the second time in about a week that I've run into this well 
> adding
> a new package?
> 
> Eventually in my release process, I will have to go to that website and 
> get
> that license, be it Apache, or whatever license it may be and package that
> up so supporting a URL method of getting a license would be nice.

My suggestion in this case would be to use <pkg>_LICENSE_FILES = N/A
(or whatever magic value is chosen) and in parallel ask the upstream
maintainer to include the license file directly into the release
tarballs.

Best regards,

Thomas
-- 
Thomas Petazzoni, Free Electrons
Embedded Linux, Kernel and Android engineering
http://free-electrons.com