On Sun, 23 Feb 2020 at 08:40, Ian Stapleton Cordasco
<graffatcolmin...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Forgive me if I'm missing something but doesn't license-file provides this 
> functionality (see https://stackoverflow.com/a/48691876) for an example.
>
> I surmise not enough people use it although it's readily available?

This is likely to be the case, as license-file[s] is a setuptools
feature aimed at ensuring the license file ends up in the sdist/wheel
archive, rather than a published metadata field aimed at allowing
other tools to *find* that license file within the sdist/wheel
archive.

There's a pre-draft PEP in discussion at
https://github.com/pombredanne/spdx-pypi-pep/pull/2 and
https://discuss.python.org/t/improving-license-clarity-with-better-package-metadata/2154
that looks at clarifying licensing metadata through the use of SPDX
classifiers. That draft PEP also formalises the "License-File" field.

The approach I'm currently taking to this problem is to combine
https://github.com/nexB/scancode-toolkit/blob/develop/README.rst for
finding component licenses with
https://github.com/nexB/aboutcode-toolkit to generate an open source
attribution bundle for those components. The one key caveat on that
approach is that the initial scancode output requires some non-trivial
cleanup before you can feed it into the aboutcode ABOUT file generator
when first applying it to a project:
https://github.com/nexB/aboutcode-toolkit/issues/416

Cheers,
Nick.

P.S. As with a lot of distribution related issues, the key challenge
with making improvements in this space is that developers really need
tools that work *today* to meet their open source attribution
obligations (such as nexB's scancode & aboutcode toolkits), while
metadata level improvements (like Philippe's draft PEP) will take
years to cover a significant proportion of published packages (and
there's a long tail of rarely updated projects that may never catch
up).

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncogh...@gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia
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