PKGCTL-LICENSE-SETUP(1)   PKGCTL-LICENSE-SETUP(1)

pkgctl-license-setup - Automatically detect and setup a basic REUSE configuration

pkgctl license setup [OPTIONS] [PKGBASE...]

This subcommand automates the creation of the Arch Linux 0BSD package license file as well as a basic reuse(1) configuration by applying simple heuristics. It comes in especially handy when initially setting up licensing for a package without the need to manually write a REUSE.toml file.

If any .patch files are detected and the PKGBUILD(5) has only a single entry in the license=() array, this subcommand assumes the patches are licensed under that license and generates annotations for them.

In case there are no patches, no additional annotations are generated.

Manual annotations are necessary in case the subcommand can’t generate a configuration that accounts for all files. In this case, reuse lint will fail with a descriptive error of which files are missing an annotation.

If no PKGBASE is specified, the command defaults to using the current working directory.

-f, --force

Overwrite existing reuse(1) configuration

--no-check

Do not run pkgctl-license-check(1) after setup

-h, --help

Show a help text

pkgctl-license(1) pkgctl-license-check(1) reuse(1) PKGBUILD(5)

https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/devtools

Please report bugs and feature requests in the issue tracker. Please do your best to provide a reproducible test case for bugs.

2025-07-29