Click packages don't appear in "License" list in ubuntu-system-settings

[Andrew Hayzen]

The music app doesn't appear in the software licenses list, available from the system-settings application and then the about section.

click doesn't provide an interface for this

[Alan Pope 🍺🐧🐱 🦄 (popey)]

I see no license files for any core app, or indeed any click package I have installed in the (enormous) list.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thanks, do you know how to get license info from clicks? "click list --manifest" doesn't include any license/copyright

[Iain Lane (laney)]

Yes. click doesn't provide an interface for that yet, so system-settings can't list them.

[Victor Thompson (vthompson)]

Either someone mentioned it on IRC awhile back, may have been you Andrew, or I've seen a bug report on this. Is there an associated bug somewhere? I searched but could not find one.

[Andrew Hayzen (ahayzen)]

It was mentioned in an IRC meeting but no bug was reported.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

Sorry this wasn't clear in the spec. Like the rest of System Settings, the "Licenses" screen is for meeting legal requirements for the operating system, not for third-party apps. If apps need to show license info, they need to do that in their own UI.

We do show lists of apps in some places in System Settings, but that is when the use case involves the whole device. For example, you want to know if anything on your phone is using location data; some of those things are apps. Or you want to know what is taking up storage space; some of that space is taken by apps.

Spec updated. <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/AboutThisDevice?action=diff&rev2=20&rev1=19>

[David Planella (dpm)]

Matthew, in this particular case, this affects apps that are pre-installed, i.e. the Music app's click package comes preinstalled in the image. Are these type of apps still considered third-party, or rather as part of the OS and would require their licenses to be shown in System Settings?

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

Ah, I misunderstood the question, but I covered it in the linked spec change anyway: "…listing all the licenses for system software and apps installed by default". I think what makes something seem like part of the system is whether it is installed by default, not whether it is uninstallable.

So I think "Click packages don't appear in 'Licenses' list" is still Invalid -- third-party apps shouldn't be able to insert themselves in there -- but "Preinstalled apps don't appear in 'Licenses' list" is a valid bug. Does that make sense?

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

If we want to fix this in click, we need to ship a seperate copyright file in a machine readable format like dep5 as part ofthe click archive. We should spec this out properly with the app dev people before implementing it as the file needs to be (auto)generated from e.g. qtcreator.