On 8/7/07, Don Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Is it absolutely necessary for that huge license header to go on every > single file? It is rather annoying to scroll through all this license > text just for a couple-line config file. I'm also concerned it bloats > the Javascript and CSS unnecessarily.
The source file policy [1] doesn't actually mandate a license header on every file - it has the following in the FAQ: "What files in an Apache release do not require a license header? A file without any degree of creativity in either its literal elements or its structure is not protected by copyright law; therefore, such a file does not require a license header. If in doubt about the extent of the file's creativity, add the license header to the file." I think for config and CSS files you could easily argue these fall under this category - although for config files it doesn't really matter that much from any performance PoV - same goes for anything compiled. The one place that (AFAIK) the ASF hasn't resolved is for interpreted files such as JavaScript - I'm sure this was raised by the Wicket team for their JavaScript during incubation - but I can't remember the outcome. For Commons Validator we got round this by adding the source file header to the JavaScript files - and then produced "compressed" versions using the Dojo/Rhino compressor[2] (now called ShrinkSafe) - which, as well as other things, removes all comments - since as I understand it generated files are not copyrightable (just original source). From memory the compressor reduced all Validators script from 54k to 17k. The good thing is the Dojo/Rhino compressor was recently added to the maven repository - I keep thinking I should write a m2 plugin using it, but haven't got round to it yet (Commons Validator m2 build calls an ant script[3] to do it). Anyway might be something worth considering for S2 anyway? Niall [1] http://www.apache.org/legal/src-headers.html [2] http://dojotoolkit.org/docs/shrinksafe [3] http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/commons/proper/validator/trunk/build-javascript.xml > Don --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
