I have opened a ticket RAT-518 [1] concerning the definition of additional
licenses.  The issue arises when additional licenses are defined but no
approved license families are included.  The default behaviour when there
is no "approved" section is to assume that all licenses defined in the file
are approved.  This strategy works well when there is a single definition
file that contains only the approved licenses.  However, if there are
additional licenses defined but that should not be approved it becomes
cumbersome.

I think there are two solutions.

   1. Change the default behaviour so that if approved license families
   have to be explicitly approved.  This may break some implementation in rare
   cases, but is easily fixable.
   2. Continue with the case where all licenses defined in a configuration
   that does not include an "approved" section are considered to be approved.
   This can lead to a case where unintended licenses are included in the
   approved list.  Since these will not be flagged, it would not be evident
   that there was an issue with the approval system.

I wanted to surface this issue and see if there were any strong feelings
about it.  If not I will proceed with the removal of the "approved" as
default.

[1] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/RAT-518

Reply via email to