[Buildroot] legal-info: multiple licenses separator

[Luca Ceresoli <luca@lucaceresoli.net>]

Hi Thomas,

Thomas De Schampheleire wrote:
> Hi Luca, all,
>
> FOO_LICENSE_FILES is a space-separated list according to the manual,
> and the code correctly reflects this.
> The manual does not specify whether FOO_LICENSE is space-separated or
> comma-separated, and the code has a mix of both. I think we should
> clarify this and line up everything with the decision.

We agreed FOO_LICENSE is just a text string.
It should be formatted such that it is as far as possible concise,
informative and correct.

>
> I believe the comma provides more clarity for complex licenses like
> FOO_LICENSE = GPLv2+, GPLv2 (py-smbus)
> I believe it is more clear here that GPLv2 applies to py-smbus, and
> GPLv2+ to all the rest.

Yes, this is the most clear syntax to me, and IIRC we agreed to use
this in the past.

>
> However, the comma conflicts with the comma separator of the CSV
> manifest. This looks like:
> "foo","1.2","GPLv2+, GPLv2 (py-smbus)","COPYING"
> while the quotes probably make standard CSV imports work correctly,
> basic command-line tools like cut won't because it would also split on
> the intermediate comma. With awk you can split on "," and manually
> remove the leading and trailing " on the line, but it's a bit more
> complex.

Yeah, you definitely have a point.

>
> I think that if we accept the comma in FOO_LICENSE, we should replace
> the separator in the manifest with something else, for example a
> semicolon ; which would not typically appear in any of the other
> fields.

I'm OK with this change. Before that we'll have to fix a few packages 
though.

At a quick analysis it seems we have 7 packages with ';' in their _LICENSE:

   $ git grep -E '_LICENSE[^_].*;' -- package/  | wc -l
   7
   $

And one of them has both ';' and ',':

   $ git grep -hE '_LICENSE[^_].*;' -- package/|grep ,
   NODEJS_LICENSE = MIT (core code); MIT, Apache and BSD family licenses 
(Bundled components)
   $

-- 
Luca