I'll add my vote for license match highlighting. This was an extremely useful feature in bsam, and for us it is the single most missed feature since the transition to nomos. In fact, while I like nomos for its speed and easier review of results, I wish bsam was not removed and was instead left as an alternative scanning agent. We are still using 1.3.0, where both agents co-exist side-by-side, and we sometimes run scans with both. When we scan with both agents, we rely primarily on nomos scan, but also check bsam results for few particular licenses of high interest to us. At times, bsam would find things that nomos missed, so it's a good complement to nomos.
One particular type of files that nomos was not stellar with is a class of debian copyright files. Those files tend to be long and list many licenses aggregated from many source files, which is in contrast to single source files with which nomos heuristics were primarily developed. Another issue we ran into with nomos is scanning of native executables. For instance, if you scan GNU tar executable with bSAM and nomos, bSAM will report GPLv3 while nomos will stay silent. GNU tar has an embedded license statement (type tar --version to see it), and bSAM finds this string. Nomos on the other hand expects files to be in a form of a single 0-terminated string, and so regexp search on a binary file will typically terminate prematurely. Of course, I realize that nomos and fossology were designed primariliy for scanning source code (possibly deeply archived), but bSAM agent's ability to find license strings in native executables was very nice, and we miss it in nomos. (By the way, one possible improvement would be to filter native executables and possibly other non-text files through Unix "strings" command prior to passing the data to nomos - e.g. that works for my GNU tar example). This is a longish post, so I'll summarize briefly: 1. license match highlighting is super-important for us 2. we would love to see bSAM reappear in its 1.3.0 form, even if no further development is planned for it 3. I'd suggest running Unix strings(1) command on native executables prior to passing the data to nomos By the way, license match highlighting was important enough for us that I've spent some time studying how nomos works and thinking about how it could be done. I have a very rough proof of concept thing that works about 90% of the time. (By "works" I mean it gives you some idea about where the license is found in the file). I'd be happy to share the ideas (and code if there is interest). This would be probably better suited for fossology-devel mailing list. Let me know if you are interested, and I could join the list and talk there... Best regards, Drago Mitrinovic Motorola Mobility Open Source Review Board On Fri, Jul 29, 2011 at 10:22 AM, Laser, Mary <mary.la...@hp.com> wrote: > Hello FOSSologists! > Thank you all for your votes. It's very important for us to hear from our > users so we know how to prioritize the many features and requests we have on > our "to-do" list. > > We REALY do listen and value your feedback. Keep it coming! > > The FOSSology Project > http://fossology.org > > > > > -----Original Message----- > > From: fossology-boun...@fossology.org [mailto:fossology- > > boun...@fossology.org] On Behalf Of Dabrowski, Ivo > > Sent: Friday, July 29, 2011 6:12 AM > > Subject: Re: [FOSSology] License highlighting (Bob Gobeille) > > > > Here's my vote, too. BSAM as used in older versions of FOSSology > > reveals matches (and derivations) easily. > > > > Ivo > > > > > > -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht----- > > Von: fossology-boun...@fossology.org [mailto:fossology- > > boun...@fossology.org] Im Auftrag von Bob Gobeille > > Gesendet: Freitag, 29. Juli 2011 01:27 > > Betreff: Re: [FOSSology] License highlighting (Bob Gobeille) > > > > Oh - multiple pages. That is painful. > > > > Thanks for voting Dave. > > > > Bob Gobeille > > > > > > On Jul 28, 2011, at 4:43 PM, Dave McLoughlin wrote: > > > > > I'll cast my vote, highlighting is very important to us. We spend a > > lot of > > > time searching, scrolling and manually scanning contents to find a > > match > > > when there's no highlighting. > > > > > > It's extremely painful when the contents are displayed across > > multiple > > > pages. > > > > > > Dave > > > > > > > > >> Date: Wed, 27 Jul 2011 12:05:56 -0600 > > >> From: Bob Gobeille <bob.gobei...@hp.com> > > >> Subject: Re: [FOSSology] License highlighting > > >> > > >> Hello Volker, > > >> The database table license_file is where nomos records what license > > matched in > > >> what file. There are columns for where in the file the match > > occurred, but > > >> they are not currently populated by nomos. > > >> > > >> Would anyone else like to vote on how important highlighting the > > license match > > >> is? > > >> > > >> Bob Gobeille > > >> > > >> > > _______________________________________________ > fossology mailing list > fossology@fossology.org > http://fossology.org/mailman/listinfo/fossology >
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