We've been discussing this on the gemcutter list too; here's a summary of my personal thoughts from that thread.
--- I'd say limit the field to a single line, which contains either: * a URL to the license * a path to a file inside the gem itself (usually license.txt) * a short name, based on a standard dictionary of licenses On Mon, Oct 17, 2011 at 9:55 PM, 7rans <transf...@gmail.com> wrote: > There is a standard, SPDX (spdx.org) Cool! The more I think about this -- which is still, admittedly, not vey much -- the more I think that a URI/URL is the way to go. Not so much for a clickable hyperlink -- which, as we can see now, is not always useful -- but as a, you know, Uniform format for Identifying and/or Locating a Resource, which is what a license field in a gem wants to do. Making our own dictionary would be a losing proposition; better to piggyback on spdx, even if it means typing "http://spdx.org/licenses/MIT"; rather than "MIT" Though actually SPDX defines a "short identifer" too, so in that example, either could work. --- Also, to answer the actual question, generally, if things are mandatory, people get annoyed and fill in garbage, which wouldn't help anything. So I'd be quite wary of making anything mandatory, especially not without having a good answer for these questions: * What if I want to publish my gem with no license? * ...with a personally crafted license? * ...in the public domain? * What are the data structure rules for the field(s)? * i.e. ...Does "MIT" mean the same as "mit" as "MIT Public License" as "M.I.T."? * Whose short name dictionary are we using? Who's responsible for maintaining and updating that list? * What about different versions and variants of the same license? (I know you've covered a lot of these points already, but just wanted to restate the questions.) -- Alex Chaffee - a...@cohuman.com - http://alexch.github.com Stalk me: http://friendfeed.com/alexch | http://twitter.com/alexch | http://alexch.tumblr.com _______________________________________________ RubyGems-Developers mailing list http://rubyforge.org/projects/rubygems RubyGems-Developers@rubyforge.org http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/rubygems-developers
