id,summary,reporter,owner,description,type,status,priority,milestone,component,version,severity,resolution,keywords,cc,difficulty,ghcversion,platform
247,Needless license warning on PublicDomain,guest,,"While looking at harp, I noticed that during 'runhaskell Setup configure', it was emitting a warning about no 'license-file' field.

Which is perfectly fine and appropriate most of the time, but harp's cabal file mentions 'License:                PublicDomain'.

Strictly speaking, PublicDomain isn't even a license. For there to be a license, there must be copyright, and public domain is by definition the lack of copyright. Even if you don't buy this, it still would not make sense to want a license file, as it cannot say anything that the words 'public domain' do not (hence, needless and wasteful). 

So Cabal is implicitly encouraging something which is wrong-headed or pointless. It's not a big deal, but it shouldn't be warning about it.

--
gwern",defect,closed,low,,Cabal library,1.2.3.0,minor,fixed,,,normal,6.8.2,