Chris Dolan wrote:
In the last year as a Fink maintainer (Mac OS X debian-like package
manager), I've come across a couple CPAN modules that have no license
information at all. It's very frustrating. I've submitted RT bugs,
but one of them has been fixed (thanks Ken Williams).
To encourage authors to correct this oversight, I propose a new pair of
Kwalitee tests. Both would be nice, but if either of them were
implemented, I'd be thrilled. I'd prefer that someone else implement
the test (lack of tuits), but if there is approval for the idea without
a motivated implementer I will take a hack at it.
1) has_license -- check for the presence of a file named something
like LICENSE or COPYING or COPYLEFT or GPL or ... (each test case
insensitive, with or without .txt extensions). Alternatively, the test
can be more liberal by looking for the string "copyright" in README,
*pm and *.pod.
2) has_meta_yml_license -- check for a META.yml field named
"license". Module::Build supports this.
That would suck, you may as well propose a Kwalitee bit for modules that
use Module::Build.
I know that the current alpha of ExtUtils::MakeMaker supports this, but
until it is released as stable *and* module authors have the time to
upgrade EU::MM *and* release a new version of their module(s), those
authors will be penalised through no fault of their own.
David
These tests should not care which license is claimed, just that there
is a license present.
Chris
--
"It's overkill of course, but you can never have too much overkill."
