Hi, as you have probably noticed, I have created a new branch for experimenting with RAT. The reason for creating a branch was that I found RAT's way of emitting output plainly confusing, at least to me. I never fully understood the system with "subject", "predicate", and "object". In particular, it was never clear to me, how "header sample", "license family", and so on relate. Apart from that, RAT-14 strongly asked for a semantically richer output than basically a table with three columns.
I have now (partially) resolved this in a way that satisfies me (but possibly others not as well): The output is now a series of "IClaim" objects with a class hierarchy that provides the semantical information. In particular (resolving RAT-14), running RAT will now result in the creation of a "ClaimStatistic". This result can be viewed on https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/rat/main/branches/rat-output-semantics/ I would now like to ask for confirmation to treat this as the base for RAT 0.7. As I do now have a more thorough understanding, I should as well be able to roll back most of my changes and create the "ClaimStatistic" with comparatively minor changes. However, my feeling is that others would share my problems in the future. If noone else intervenes, then I'd move the current trunk to "branches/apache-rat-project-0.6" and my private branch to the trunk. I'd also like to use the "ClaimStatistics" to create a set of so-called policies. Policies would be simple plugins for the RAT Maven Plugin, which allow to configure the required behaviour quite easily. Typical policies might be "only ASL files", "only approved licenses", "at most 3 unknown files", and so on. This allows projects to integrate RAT into their standard build, refusing the build, if the policy isn't met. Jochen -- I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone. -- (Bjarne Stroustrup, http://www.research.att.com/~bs/bs_faq.html#really-say-that My guess: Nokia E50)
