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.@GROUP, which accepts all licenses in a particular group.-@GROUP, which unaccepts all licenses in a particular group.-*, which unaccepts all licenses.*, which accepts all licenses.
Any token may be quoted using either single or double quotes.
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 */* *