Arch Linux

Lone_Wolf

Administrator

From: Netherlands, Europe

Registered: 2005-10-04

Posts: 15,556

How to deal with multiple sourcecode licenses at build time ?

One of my AUR packages is for oolite-git .

Upstream added code to create PDFs as user documentation .

That code uses typst (in extra repo) but also needs a binary plugin that is published under the MIT license.
As far as I can tell this is the only portion of oolite sourcecode that uses this license.
The code & license are present in the sourcetree at Documentation/docs/typst/

It is only used at buildtime and not part of the resulting package.

Should the PKGBUILD mention the usage of this code ?
If so, how ?

Could there be legal consequences of using/including tools that have a different license then the vast majority of the sourcecode ?

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Disliking systemd intensely, but not satisfied with alternatives so focusing on taming systemd.

clean chroot building not flexible enough ?
Try clean chroot manager by graysky

5hridhyan

Member

Registered: 2025-12-25

Posts: 1,133

Re: How to deal with multiple sourcecode licenses at build time ?

I thought license=() was package metadata describing the licences of the packaged software, rather than a comprehensive list of every licence associated w/ anything involved in its compilation...

So IMO, in your case, since the MIT-licensed code is only used at build time and isn't included in the resulting package, documenting it in a comment should be sufficient from a packaging-metadata perspective. I don't think it needs to be added to license=()

....

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Gentoo is where dreams and compile times go to die.
And you'll definitely find me talking to a wall :-)