adobe-flashplugin installs without license agreement

Downloading the plugin implies agreement to the EULA. The EULA is on the adobe website and this is noted in the package description.

What package did you install that also installed flash? ubuntu restricted extras?

On the Adobe website this is an obvious step: click the respective button. In the case of a package which can be installed automatically as a dependency there is no such obvious step to accept the EULA (I wouldn't have even known the package was being installed had I not spotted it downloading). In my case the primary package I installed was Opera, but I don't consider that relevant.

It's not really my place to say, but I would suggest some kind of prompt at installation time (like Debian does on some packages) may be the best solution, or alternatively only enabling the respective repository after prompting the user on the EULA, or some such.

For what its worth, my real gripe is that I prefer to choose on a case-by-case basis which non-free (by DFSG terms) software I install, and since I had chosen not to install Adobe flash I was not happy about it being installed behind-my-back, so to speak. However accepting or not accepting Adobe's EULA is a close enough proxy that it doesn't seem worth worrying about the difference.

This would be inconsistent with all the other non-free packages in the partner repo or in multiverse which don't display the license at install time. I don't think relying on the fact that the license is displayed in this one particular case is significant.

Debian does have some prompts for things like Java and Microsoft fonts, but not for the flashplugin-nonfree package (I run Debian sid and I just tested it by uninstalling/reinstalling Flash). So actually, I think the issue is more with the Opera packaging pulling Flash.

I disagree that dependency handling is to blame, but that's just my 2¢. No idea about the other packages, but agree that handling things uniformly makes sense.

By the way you may have misjudged the flashplugin-nonfree package: from what I remember, it doesn't install flash directly, but has to be run from the command-line to do so, and it probably asks the licence then.

Yes, I removed the package, reinstalled it, used the update commmand to install/uninstall the plugin, etc. and I didn't get a forced prompt. Maybe that's because Adobe doesn't require the user to explicitly agree to the EULA when downloading.