RFC: REUSE compliance plugin for PkgTemplates.jl — API, docs, and root LICENSE behavior

Yes, pragmatically we can do both for Julia packages intended for General. That is also what I would implement as the default.

But I do not think this is conceptually neutral. Once a project uses REUSE to describe file-level licensing, a conventional root LICENSE file becomes a coarse compatibility artifact. If LICENSES/ contains several license texts, a human reader may easily treat the root LICENSE file as the authoritative project license, even though the actual licensing state is described by SPDX headers, REUSE.toml, and LICENSES/.

In a fully REUSE-oriented setup with multiple licenses, I would rather expect a root LICENSE file to be a pointer, e.g.

LICENSE
    "This project is REUSE-compliant.
     See LICENSES/, SPDX headers, and REUSE.toml for actual licensing."

But I understand that this would not satisfy current General registry expectations.

A future RegistryCI check could in principle go further and check whether each distributed file has an OSI-approved licensing path, as sketched above. I understand that this is not likely to happen immediately, but it remains the technically cleaner model in my opinion.