Hi Fabian,
2013/3/20 Fabian Christ <[email protected]> > Regarding the RAT check: > > 2013/3/20 Sebastian Schaffert <[email protected]>: > > I was looking at how Stanbol does it and was not too happy about it, > > because it creates a maintenance headache with too many exclude files > > distributed over the source tree. I prefer having an overview over what > is > > excluded so it is easy to fix. > > Yes, it is a maintenance headache. But otherwise I have not seen a way > to control it properly. Well, I consider the way we did it to "control it properly". I have the same options in the parent POM that I have in individual exclude files. I can also explicitly specify individual files or directories there without applying a general rule. The reason for the general rules is as I explained - these files do not support a comment format. > We (in Stanbol) are doing it this way based on > the comments by our mentor Bertrand during incubation. We even place a > README somewhere near the excluded file that informs about the license > of that file. > > I understand your viewpoint but how does the Marmotta podling itself > check the headers? How do you convince yourself? By checking each of the excluded files individually before the release and tracking where they came from - same as I do for other dependencies that are explicitly excluded (like jQuery). For most it is easy (kwrl and ldpath are our own formats, so they will be under our copyright). For some it requires checking who added them when. For the future I'd like to install a policy that such files should only be added to the source tree if they are created originally by the committer. Once we have the Jenkins server running I will add the RAT plugin to the default build cycle so noone can add anything without it being checked - then is also the time to restrict the rules further (and possibly create one or more separate exclude files with more explicit patterns). For now, all excluded files have been checked manually before the release (this is what I spent my last Friday with...). > The fact that some > file formats do not support comments does not prevent you from the > burden to specify the license of such a specific file somehow. The > problem is that there is AFAIK no default for files without any > license information. > Hmm, I checked the documentation on the Apache website and it does not provide much information about it. We could treat such files as "binary files", which would simply require NOTICE in case they come from a third party, and otherwise they are already covered by the main LICENSE file. This is the way we are handling the situation at the moment. http://www.apache.org/legal/src-headers.html > But since I am also rather new in the Apache world, this may be a > situation where in practice it could be handled as you did. I would > like to hear the opinion of the other mentors on this. > > Andy, any suggestions? Greetings, Sebastian
