[opam-devel] license for passwdgen

[Sylvain Le Gall]

>
>> Here is a proposal:
>>
>> - extend the metadata for opam packages with a "licenses" key, holding
>>   a list of the licenses used in the source code (that may include
>>   "unknown"); for this, we need a standardised list of values, and the
>>   SPDX standardised list available here https://spdx.org/licenses/ is
>>   a good starting point (incomplete, though, as they do not list our
>>   favorite LGPL with OCaml exception :-))
>
> OASIS has a nice library to handle all this doesn't it?  CCing Sylvain to
> see if it can be separately used by OPAM.
>

OASIS has indeed a nice library (parser + types) to handle this. It
will be a shame to not share it with OCamlPro/OPAM people. Although as
per JS request I try to prevent having too much deps so that you'll
have a single tarball for OASIS, so I am not reluctant to split this
part (can be discussed though). Although the API is provided by the
OASIS library and OPAM people can use it (at least to see if it fits
their need).

https://github.com/ocaml/oasis/blob/master/src/oasis/OASISLicense.mli
it is based on Debian's DEP5:
http://dep.debian.net/deps/dep5/#license-specification

If you can talk to Yaron and he thinks it is a good idea to split this
part so that we have a common library for OPAM and OASIS, I am all for
it.

BTW, DEP5 supports LGPL-2.1 with OCaml linking exception and it is
coded in OASISLicense...

We can have an even more precise licensing scheme, using a bigger part
of the DEP5 (include file patterns to attribute license and
copyright). That was out of scope for OASIS, but can perfectly be
included in a more generic library.

Regards
Sylvain