licenses.conf / licences.conf
This document applies only to clients using PaludisEnvironment. Any standard client that supports a
--environment command line option uses PaludisEnvironment unless overridden, either by
explicitly selecting another environment (e.g. --environment portage) or, on distributions also
supporting Portage, by lack of a Paludis configuration and presence of a Portage configuration.
We apologise for misspelling 'licence' as 'license' throughout. This is done to match the ebuild variable 'LICENSE', whose name cannot be fixed for Gentoo-based distributions for historical reasons.
On Gentoo and derived distributions, the licenses.conf file controls which licenses are and are not
accepted. It is a standard configuration file which may be a bash file (licenses.bash) and which may use the
licenses.conf.d/ directory.
On Exherbo, the licences.conf file controls which licences are and are not accepted. It is a standard
configuration file which may be a bash file (licences.bash) and which may use the
licences.conf.d/ directory.
Each line in the file consists of a specification followed by one or more license symbols. A specification may be any of:
- The special specification
*/*, which matches all packages. Nearly all users will have at least one line using this specification. - A simple
category/packagename. - A simple
setname. - A complex dependency specification.
A license symbol can be any of:
license, which accepts that license.-license, which unaccepts that license.-*, which unaccepts all licenses.*, which accepts all licenses.
Any token may be quoted using either single or double quotes. Note that CRAN repository entries can use spaces in license names, so quoting would be required to explicitly accept those licenses.
License settings are cumulative. To only accept listed licenses for a given spec, include -* in
the symbols list.
Example
Most users will only want:
# Accept everything */* *