Adding License Agreement in RPM package

Question

Is it possbile to add License agreement in the RPM package? When user installs the RPM, it should prompt to accept the user license agreement.

Answer 1

This is a bad idea for both technical and user-interface reasons.

Not only because there may be no display during install, but also because there may be no user during installation or even first run, or the mechanism for extracting the rpm file may simply not support any method to display text or accept input.

Essentially, if you have to do this, the least worst way is to do Ignacio suggests, which is what Sun do, and create a RPM file with no such restriction, then put it inside a self-extracting binary which displays the license, prompts the user and then unwraps the RPM. In the spirit of ruining the user experience, you will also require a set of instructions like these created by Sun: JRE RPM Installation for Linux.

The correct way of doing this of course is to use the License field and include a file as %doc which contains your licensing terms. This does away with the 'click-through' step, which maybe unacceptable to your lawyers, although it is widely considered to be unenforceable anyway.

This is the section of the RPM guidelines which addresses such things:

The package may not use interactive pre-install, post-install, pre-uninstall, or post-uninstall scripts. The user must not be prompted at anytime during the install, upgrade, or removal — Everything must be completely automated. (RPM Guidelines, Fedora Project)

Remember, the first impression your user will get of your product could be either this:
_{(source: virtuatopia.com)}

or this:

_{(source: flickr.com)}