Chris Dolan wrote:
On Nov 2, 2005, at 10:19 AM, David Landgren wrote:
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
What penalty? The whole point of Kwalitee is not to reward authors who
jump through hoops, but to encourage authors to live up to community
I don't know how to distinguish between someone who likes to jumps
through hoops and someone who cares about their modules. I choose to
achieve the highest possible Kwalitee for my modules because it's a way
of showing people that I care.
expectations. That includes good packaging, good POD and, I say
emphatically, clear licensing. Anything we can do to encourage authors
to more clearly state their license is a good thing. If that in turn
means encouraging them to 1) use Module::Build, 2) upgrade EU::MM or 3)
hand-edit META.yml, then I think that's a burden worth bearing.
My licensing terms are clearly stated in the POD, using the more-or-less
canonical "licensed under the same terms as Perl itself" term.
I am not going to use Module::Build. I've tried it but I prefer EU::MM,
at least for the time being. I'm all for the concept, but I wanted to do
something really basic with it for a new module a while ago. I forget
the details, but after futzing around for a while I just found it easier
to go back to EU::MM.
Hand-editing META.yml doesn't work. It gets overwritten when I make
tardist or something. If there's a way around that, I'm all ears.
You're complaining that its too big a burden to clearly state your
module's license? To me that's just crazy. To some people, the
license is actually more important than the module (e.g. if I can only
redistribute Artistically license code).
No. I'm complaining that there's no need for two different Kwalitee
points for this, that's all. I think one is sufficient (and a very
worthy one I should add, in case I wasn't being clear, which I probably
wasn't).
David
--
"It's overkill of course, but you can never have too much overkill."
