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.

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