* Gabor Szabo <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2008-10-22T07:09:16] > 1) META.yml license field is required. > > http://module-build.sourceforge.net/META-spec.html#license > says the license field is "required" but FAIK when calling > "make dist" or "./Build dist" both EUMM and MB will happily > create META.yml files without a license field. If there is an > agreement on the field being required then I think the tools > should not create a distribution without a valid license key. > Obviously they should keep installing modules without a > license in META.yml.
If nothing else, it should warn. I am all for failure, though. I will tell you why. Some time ago, I picked up maintenance of Data::UUID to apply some patches. I made some releases before someone pointed out that there was no explicit license. I tried to contact the author and was unable to reach him. Nearly everyone agrees that the author meant for this to be freely redistributable and modifiable software -- it just seems too likely. That doesn't help much, though. He didn't make an explicit statement. If he'd initially make dist and gotten "no license specified! do x, y, z" then he would've done so, and I would have never had to bother thinking about this problem. > 2) The list of valid values should be in > http://module-build.sourceforge.net/META-spec.html#license > instead of its current place, which is > http://search.cpan.org/dist/Module-Build/lib/Module/Build/API.pod I would be really happy if we had CPAN::METAyml::Spec or something on the CPAN. > 3) Software::License http://search.cpan.org/dist/Software-License/ > has a growing list of licenses with full text in it. The list of licenses > is not the same as the values in META.yml and even in the cases > where the license seem to be the same their "short name" is not > identical. IMHO these lists should be unified. I don't care where we get the list from so much, but we need things to be *clear*. Having "license: gpl" in the META.yml is not clear, because there are many versions of the GPL, and the META.yml field does not specify which is meant. The same goes for some other values. Software::License tries to be explicit. > 4) Module::Starter and similar tools should use the same list > (maybe taken directly from Software::License) to guide the users > when they create a new module. Software::License is not entirely unrelated to some similar code in an alternative to Module::Starter, ExtUtils::ModuleMaker. Module::Starter is sort of free-form in how it allows stuff. Dist::Zilla uses Software::License directly, although I'm sure it's not well tested for things other than 'perl' license. I think all these things will be easier if we have a clearer, more explicit specification for what means what. > 5) search.cpan.org is using the META.yml to display the license name. > Once we have a better list it will probably reflect that. Sounds good. -- rjbs
