The goal that I’m hoping to realistically attain is to have tooling 
automatically generate these files, thus alleviating a lot of scut work done by 
podlings and mentors.  Maybe not a realistic goal but a pretty good dream.  :)

On to the details:

On Feb 8, 2014, at 7:42 PM, sebb <seb...@gmail.com> wrote:

> On 8 February 2014 16:49, Alan Cabrera <l...@toolazydogs.com> wrote:
>> Do you think it would be helpful if we had a tool that generated these 
>> files?  It could work like a command line wizard that prompts the person for 
>> licensing information and then generates a valid disclaimer, notice, etc. 
>> files.
> 
> AIUI the disclaimer file is the same for every project - only the
> project name changes.
> Seems unnecessary to automate this, though it should be trivial to implement.

Agreed, though it would be handy for podlings that are starting out, imo.

> The NOTICE file is much harder to automate, as it depends on knowing
> what is actually going to be shipped and reading and interpreting all
> the relevant licenses.
> However it might be possible to create a sort of expert system that
> asked the right questions and guided the user to create the NOTICE
> file.

That’s my thinking.  We would have relevant metadata on 3rd party projects

>> If this is a good idea, what files should we generate?  Currently, all I can 
>> think of is disclaimer and notice.
>> 
>> Maybe it could add the info into the project's DOAP file.  If we worked out 
>> the kinks then we could create sbt/gradle/mvn plugins to read the DOAP file 
>> and insert these files into the correct places in the distributions.  Apache 
>> RAT could also use this info as well.
> 
> The DOAP could certainly be used to create the DISCLAIMER.
> 
> It seems wrong to include any dependency information in the DOAP.
> 
> Dependencies must be present somewhere in the build scripts, however
> even in Maven (which has very structured info) it's not at all easy to
> determine which dependencies are actually included in the release
> artifacts (and remember that source and binary artifacts may need
> different NOTICE files)
> 
> Note also that some source files may require attribution in the NOTICE file.
> These won't be documented in any build system; the info has to be
> added to the NOTICE file manually when the code is added to SCM.
> 
>> WDYT?
> 
> Non-trivial; maintaining the meta-data needed to accurately generate
> the NOTICE file is likely to require more effort than writing the
> NOTICE file itself.
> 
>> 
>> Regards,
>> Alan
>> 
>> 
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