Re: [RFC] vlicense hook

[ahesford <ahesford@users.noreply.github.com>]

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New comment by ahesford on void-packages repository

https://github.com/void-linux/void-packages/pull/21272#issuecomment-621778708

Comment:
> > Is license change a common enough problem that
> > it's worth adding a checksum? The point of `license_files` is
> > to simplify license installation, not increase the burden.
> 
> The point is: license should be changed _very_ rarely.
> If there's a change in LICENSE, we need to know and update the license field.
> Hence, I think adding a checksum makes more sense to me.

The rarity of relicensing militates against adding a checksum. Adding more burden on the packagers just to catch some corner cases doesn't seem to be worthwhile.

Furthermore, this would only be an issue if a project changed the license from something that shouldn't be installed (e.g., Apache-2.0 or one of the GPL versions) to something that should be installed. Most of those cases would be moving away from GPL (6933 templates in `void-packages` reference GPL; only 702 reference Apache; only 105 reference GFDL), but I suspect (based purely on anecdotes) that almost no projects that adopt the GPL tend to move away from it---license churn seems to happen more among other licenses.

If a package already requires `vlicense` and changes to another license, the package metadata may be wrong, but the package will still install the correct license on disk.

This seems like a practical non-issue to me.