Re: [Savannah-hackers-public] my intro

[hiren]

On Thu, 2008-12-11 at 17:41 -0600, Karl Berry wrote:
> I don't know what's best to look for the file. Either check all files
>     for bits of existing licenses, or check for a set of widespread file
>     names. It nothing is found, show `ls` to the user so she can easily
>     check manually?
> 
> My suggestion is 
> 
> 1) check if there is a top-level file COPYING and/or LICENSE.  That's
>    it.  Yes, people use other names, but they're uncommon.

I'm happy to go with this, and see how it works in testing against
projects when I get around to doing that.

> 
> 2) if yes, fine ... although ideally it would also check that the file
>    actually contains a (free) license.  (That sounds less than easy,
>    unless one of the existing scripts already has a mode for doing it,
>    in addition to checking license notices.)

yip this check only looks for an explicit license file, which was one of
the requirements, another portion will be checking for the type of
license etc, from which I will borrow from the checklicense script from
debian. I'll probably get around to doing that portion this weekend.

> 
> 3) if no, then the script will output the failure, and the savannah
>    admin is going to have to investigate anyway.  I don't see that
>    anything is gained by having the script to do an ls.  It's not like
>    this job can be done blindly.

yea manual checking will have to be done at the end, if a license file
doesn't exist, I'll leave out the "ls" for now, and see if it helps more
when this tool is complete and testing can start.

> 
> karl