@@ -445,6 +445,12 @@ not and can not work as people would expect it should:
to let you know, and +not saved+ will appear in the +license files+ field
of the manifest file for this package.
+* +LIBFOO_TAINTS+ shoud be set to YES if a package taints a Buildroot
+ configuration. A Buildroot configuration is tainted when a packages uses
+ external dependencies for which Buildroot cannot clearly recover licensing
+ informations. If a configuration is tainted, it means that the licensing
+ information produced by +make legal-info+ could not be accurate.
+
* +LIBFOO_ACTUAL_SOURCE_TARBALL+ only applies to packages whose
+LIBFOO_SITE+ / +LIBTOO_SOURCE+ pair points to an archive that does
not actually contain source code, but binary code. This a very
@@ -73,6 +73,18 @@ distribution is required).
When you run +make legal-info+, Buildroot produces warnings in the +README+
file to inform you of relevant material that could not be saved.
+Furthermore, a Buildroot configuration could be tainted from a package that uses
+some custom external dependencies from the Buildroot tree. An example could be
+a package manager for a software stack that downloads the required dependencies
+during the building of a package. In such cases, Buildroot cannot check the
+licensing of the downloaded software and thus giving accurate licensing
+informations.
+To check if your configuration is tainted, run:
+
+--------------------
+make check-tainted
+--------------------
+
Finally, keep in mind that the output of +make legal-info+ is based on
declarative statements in each of the packages recipes. The Buildroot
developers try to do their best to keep those declarative statements as