[Docs]

[htgoebel]

Summary

Was reading the documentation for setuptools v68.2.2 and have problems understanding the meaning of the 'license' meta-data field, see https://setuptools.pypa.io/en/stable/deprecated/distutils/setupscript.html#additional-meta-data

The license field is a text indicating the license covering the package where the license is not a selection from the “License” Trove classifiers.

For me it is unclear, what this "where … is not a selection from" means:

• Is this fields only to be set if the license is not one of those available as “License” Trove classifier?
• Is the field allowed to be set if the license is not one of those available as “License” Trove classifier?
• Does this field take precedence over any “License” Trove classifier listed in the package? Or the other way round?

OS / Environment

n/a

Additional Information

Proposal for rewording:

The license field is a text indicating the license covering the package if the license of the package is available as the “License” Trove classifiers.
If the license is available as “License” Trove classifier, please use that one and leave the license field away.
If the license is not available as “License” Trove classifier, please set “License” Trove classifier to License :: Other/Proprietary License and briefly state the license here.

Code of Conduct

• I agree to follow the PSF Code of Conduct

[abravalheri]

Hi @htgoebel, to be honest the page you are referring to is part of the distutils documentation that setuptools simply carries over for archival/consultation, but otherwise overwrites with more "up-to-date" docs outside of the .../deprecated/... URL.

The newer docs say:

• license: A string specifying the license of the package.
• license_files: A list of glob patterns for license related files that should be included. If neither license_file nor license_files is specified, this option defaults to LICEN[CS]E*, COPYING*, NOTICE*, and AUTHORS*.

So yes, you kind of can put anything you want there.

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The Core Metadata specification (which is the thing produced with the information you give to setuptools) does define License as:

Text indicating the license covering the distribution where the license is not a selection from the “License” Trove classifiers. See “Classifier” below. This field may also be used to specify a particular version of a license which is named via the Classifier field, or to indicate a variation or exception to such a license.

Examples:

License: This software may only be obtained by sending the
         author a postcard, and then the user promises not
         to redistribute it.

License: GPL version 3, excluding DRM provisions

However, there is a strong push in the community to use SPDX license identifiers and get rid of the license classifiers (see pending PEP 639 draft). Personally, my current approach is to always use license_files and then add an SPDX id to license, and basically ignore the classifiers because I don't think they contribute much, but each individual decides what works best for them 😝.

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Regarding your suggestions, please note that we normally don't modify anything in the distutils namespace in this project, they are simply archived for historical reasons. But if you want to modify distutils docs the best would be opening an issue/discussion in the pypa/distutils repository and check with the maintainers there if the change is welcome there.

Now if you want to modify the documentation pages referring to setuptools itself, please feel free to open a PR. In my personal opinion, I prefer to wait until PEP 639 is finally approved before providing official advice (since it may change until it reaches a "ready" state).

For now the field is kind of a "free form" string that users can decide how to best fit their needs.