Rust packaging licensing problem

Idea proposal 💡

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Summary

Fix the Rust packaging licensing problem

Motivation

Just a little idea to kick-start some discussion on the whole Rust licensing situation. Refer recent a-d-p mailing list post.

To be honest, haven't really looked into the Rust ecosystem much, but the whole "link all crates statically into the end result and distribute it" thing is really quite stomach churning. Yeah I get it.. no stable Rust ABI.. blah blah whatever 😬

Anyway, while preparing an update to https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/libblkio, it got me thinking about how other distros handle this kind of thing which led to here and here for example.

Specification

Maybe we could achieve something similar by employing cargo-license? i.e. adding it as a makedep then calling cargo-license inside prepare() or build() and check the output for dealing with manually by the PM? Just for the hell of it, I have whacked this into the aforementioned AUR pkg as a quick demo. Something like this should ultimately be handled by namcap.. and of course it would be better if the functionality was built into cargo itself.

Anyway, I'm sure folks are already considering options.. so just wanted to throw this into the mix. 😄