On Sat, Feb 28, 2015 at 04:38:16PM +0100, Björn Persson wrote:
2: When a package has a list of authors separate from the license file, should that list also be tagged as a license file, or is it considered regular documentation? It seems to me that *who* gives out a license is important information that belongs together with the license.
With a big "I'm not Fedora Legal" disclaimer, I think the answer here is really... it depends.
The intent here is primarily to make it possible to exclude bulky documentation for containers and other space-constrained installations while keeping legally-required license statements in place. Authorship files may or may not be part of that.
A second benefit is deduplicating license files themselves, which is very minor for _space_ but might be useful in determining slight variations in licenses — either intentional or accidental (or just things like "FSF address changed again"). This seems very unlikely to apply to AUTHORS files.