licensecheck still broken
Dominique Dumont
dod at debian.org
Thu Nov 19 16:33:25 UTC 2015
On Wednesday 18 November 2015 21:08:04 Nicholas Bamber wrote:
> 1.) Your thoughts on #472199? My reading of the bug report is you have
> no interest in this as you provide the functionality in cme. On the
> other hand I'd quite like something in this direction as this would
> remove the need to map between the legacy licensecheck format and DEP-5
> format.
It would be relatively easy to modify licensecheck to output DEP-5 format
instead of the current format.
But who would want a dep-5 file with one paragraph per scanned file ?
That would create huge output for big packages.
> 2.) I was wondering about all the test scraps in the test/licensecheck .
> We could (or perhaps more realistically "could if we writing the tests
> now") get the test data from the Software::License module.
Err, as far as I know, there's no examples of file headers in Software::License
module to test license data extraction.
Did I miss something ?
> Oh thinking about it a bit more, I guess I am asking if we could define
> what the precise role of licensecheck is.
I think its current role as data extractor is fine. We'll have more trouble
finding maintainers later on if it does more like coalescing data.
> The problem of going from wild source code to DEP-5 is hard.
>
> You seem to have attempted that in cme and good luck to you.
I'm trying to address 2 problems on top of data extraction:
- coalescing data. This is done in a library used by scan-copyrights and cme
- merging old copyright data with new one. This is done only by cme.
> I added a little of that to license-reconcile but I do not see it as its
> role. The idea is that once you have a license-reconcile config file, it
> can evolve with the source code and tie the copyright file and source
> code together with all moving in sync. That seems to me be the easiest
> approach in the long run and it asks very little of licensecheck.
I see license-reconcile as a tool to help a manual merge of old copyright data
with new data. cme tries to do this automatically.
Note that ghostscript package seems to have a similar mechanism to reconcile
copyright data.
> It could rely on licensecheck to produce DEP-5 license tags or it could
> handle it itself. I just want that effort is only invested into that job
> in the right places. Is licensecheck the right place or
> license-reconcile and cme?
If you mean producing license tags in dep5 format (i.e. "gpl-2", "gpl-2+").
Then yes, I think this should be done in licensecheck, but doing so without
yet another option may break current tools (e.g. ghostscript package).
> Similarly look at
> https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=519080 . Is that going
> too far?
No. This bug is fine. I thought I fixed this in 2.15.6, but only the first
owner is extracted. I'll fix this.
> I think we should either discuss a plan for these bugs or tag them wontfix.
Agreed. I think that #472199 should be tagged wontfix or its title should be
changed to "need a tool to create dep-5 file from source file".
scan-copyrights does this work. I'm fine with extracting it from libconfig-
model-dpkg-perl once it has stabilized enough.
All the best
--
https://github.com/dod38fr/ -o- http://search.cpan.org/~ddumont/
http://ddumont.wordpress.com/ -o- irc: dod at irc.debian.org
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