On 17/08/2010 12:56, Jochen Wiedmann wrote:
On Tue, Aug 17, 2010 at 1:46 PM, Ross Gardler<[email protected]> wrote:
So for now I'd rather keep the question simple:
"Is it done?"
And that's exactly the question I cannot answer. You seem to have a
bigger vision for what RAT *could* do. And I cannot share that vision,
because I have no idea what that might mean technically.
OK, fair enough. I'll answer your question then.
For me an audit tool will assist an RM, at present RAT assists
developers with license headers. So audit focussed features might include:
- identify (potentially) incompatible licenses in releases
- ensure notice files are complete
- ensure all copies of bundled libraries have their licences present
- ensure version numbers have been correctly updated
- check distributions are signed properly
- ???
Added "nice to have" extras that go beyond release audit could include:
- ensuring all developers are appropriately credited
- build change logs
- uploading verified distribution files
- test downloads have been mirrored correctly
- sending notification mails
- maybe even provide a full release management workflow tool
Obviously the list could go on forever and hence my question, is it done?
The design of RAT makes it quite easy to do the very first of these
(check for other headers and compare against a compatibility table), but
even though I want it I've never found the time to do it. Yet I do use RAT.
Hence my question "is it done?"
Personally I'd love to see RAT grow into a genuine Audit tool. Just this
week I needed to use one because someone claimed one of my releases had
a GPL file in it. It took 10 minutes with a real license audit tool [1]
to tell me they were false positives from Ohloh.
Why not use that Audit tool?
All it does it check for licence headers. It's essentially RAT with a
front end and more complete matchers. I would like to see more (see
above) Flossology is GPL, hence I like the idea of RAT being a full
license audit tool and possibly more.
However, as I said earlier, my wishes and desires don't write code ;-)
Ross
[1] http://www.fossology.org
