On Wed, Dec 28, 2011 at 8:42 AM, Robert Burrell Donkin <robertburrelldon...@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote: > (Whisker wrangles licensing materials for applications assembled from > numerous components) > > The plugin for Maven now generates LICENSE and NOTICE documents from a > descriptor. The next step is working out the best integration approach. > > The primary use case is easing licensing maintenance for applications > assembled by Maven from large numbers of components (like Apache James > email server). I suppose that these documents could just be copied over > during assembly but is this the best approach?
Wandering in at this point, so please excuse redundancy: It seems to me that the Maven data model is sadly weak here. Maven components can have a license, but no machine-readable specification of NOTICE requirements. I am thus thinking that a plugin can assist in maintaining a file that keeps track of the information that must be sorted out by people. Essentially, it's a table: DEPENDENCY, LICENSE, NOTICE where NOTICE could be 'none', or an indication to pull the contents of some file in the dependency's jar file, or some text to include in the NOTICE file. Plugin goals would create this file, add or subtract from it based on current state of the dependency graph, and ultimately generate the desired NOTICE file for the whole business. It also strikes me that there's an aggregation question: when a project makes an aggregated source release in addition to some collection of binary things, all of this has to be summed across the individual components. > > Would deeper integration bring any benefit? > > Opinions? Ideas? Objections? > > Robert
