On Nov 2, 2005, at 10:19 AM, David Landgren wrote:
Chris Dolan wrote:
In the last year as a Fink maintainer (Mac OS X debian-like
package manager), I've come across a couple CPAN modules that
have no license information at all. It's very frustrating. I've
submitted RT bugs, but one of them has been fixed (thanks Ken
Williams).
To encourage authors to correct this oversight, I propose a new
pair of Kwalitee tests. Both would be nice, but if either of
them were implemented, I'd be thrilled. I'd prefer that someone
else implement the test (lack of tuits), but if there is approval
for the idea without a motivated implementer I will take a hack
at it.
1) has_license -- check for the presence of a file named
something like LICENSE or COPYING or COPYLEFT or GPL or ... (each
test case insensitive, with or without .txt extensions).
Alternatively, the test can be more liberal by looking for the
string "copyright" in README, *pm and *.pod.
2) has_meta_yml_license -- check for a META.yml field named
"license". Module::Build supports this.
That would suck, you may as well propose a Kwalitee bit for modules
that use Module::Build.
I know that the current alpha of ExtUtils::MakeMaker supports this,
but until it is released as stable *and* module authors have the
time to upgrade EU::MM *and* release a new version of their module
(s), those authors will be penalised through no fault of their own.
David
What penalty? The whole point of Kwalitee is not to reward authors
who jump through hoops, but to encourage authors to live up to
community expectations. That includes good packaging, good POD and,
I say emphatically, clear licensing. Anything we can do to encourage
authors to more clearly state their license is a good thing. If that
in turn means encouraging them to 1) use Module::Build, 2) upgrade
EU::MM or 3) hand-edit META.yml, then I think that's a burden worth
bearing.
You're complaining that its too big a burden to clearly state your
module's license? To me that's just crazy. To some people, the
license is actually more important than the module (e.g. if I can
only redistribute Artistically license code).
After all, Kwalitee is not an entrance barrier to CPAN. It's a tool
to let authors know what is important to the rest of us.
Chris
--
Chris Dolan, Software Developer, Clotho Advanced Media Inc.
608-294-7900, fax 294-7025, 1435 E Main St, Madison WI 53703
Clotho Advanced Media, Inc. - Creators of MediaLandscape Software
(http://www.media-landscape.com/) and partners in the revolutionary
Croquet project (http://www.opencroquet.org/)
