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.