On 22.08.2012 22:26, Robert Burrell Donkin wrote:
On 08/22/12 09:01, Andre Fischer wrote:
Hi,
Hi Andre
I am working with the Apache OpenOffice (Incubating) project. We are
using Rat to find potential license problems.
Cool. You might also be interested in taking a look at Whisker (once
it's released), a tool aimed at making it easier to maintain accurate
legal documents.
<snip>
I am currently working on better integrating Rat into our build process
and I have a question regarding the handling of binary files. Rat is
started from an Ant script, so file exclusion is handled by Ant. Some of
our files are binary, eg OpenOffice text documents that are used for
testing, zip files, jar files, images. If such a binary is reported by
Rat then its content (well, a part of it) is written to the output xml
file. This causes an error in the xslt transformation that we use to
transform the output xml to html.
Now my question. Is there a way mark certain files as binary so that
they are still reported but without including their content?
I'm not sure anything springs to mind (hopefully someone will jump in if
I'm mistaken) but this is something Rat should support and I'd be happy
to help develop a solution.
Thanks, I may take you up on your offer.
When Rat runs, it classifies documents and processes them based on the
category. Those it classifies as 'binary' are not checked for license
headers but are included in the report.
It would be reasonable to allow additional inclusion and exclusion regex
matchers to allow 'binary' diagnosis to be customised.
Would this be good enough?
Absolutely.
Rat hard codes a list of binary files, so if you have give us a list of
problematic file extensions and types we might be able to add some.
I would prefer the dynamic solution you outlined above.
As far as dumping binary data out and stuffing up the XSLT, it's
probably unwise for Rat to do this in any case. Unless Rat starts
supporting encodings more fully, probably wise to sniff out
ASCII-nature. Not sure how smart this would need to be...
Opinions? Objections? Alternatives? Improvements?
If I find the time I will look at the Rat source code and see if I can
come up with a solution.
-Andre
