I believe that this more general approach needs to be explicitly stated. I had assumed that when the spec talks about “letters” (or strings) it refers to “Unicode letters”. Therefore a normalization step would always be needed before string comparison. Searching the spec, I see no relevant reference to Unicode.
Side note: I can easily envision a license identifier with Greek letters (the Greek-ported CCs, for example), although probably not in the pre-defined short identifiers list. -- zvr From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Wheeler, David A Sent: Friday, November 13, 2015 10:45 PM To: Ben Balter <[email protected]>; Gary O'Neall <[email protected]>; [email protected] Subject: RE: Are SPDX license identifiers case-sensitive? My personal preference would be that the license identifiers be *matched* by forcing everything to lower case, AND that SPDX encourage *displays* of a license identifier to use the exact mixed-case as shown in the SPDX lists. The mixed-case forms use normal English conventions (all-caps for acronyms, initial caps for proper names), and it’s NICE to have a display that uses standard conventions. However, requiring exact-case matching is a recipe for subtle mistakes; the actual matching should be case-insensitive, just like license expressions which use them are. I note that the OSI website accepts both the exact-case and the all-lower-case versions of the SPDX license IDs. That’s why I say “to lower case” instead of “match ignoring case” – in the case of URLs, you have to know EXACTLY what to transform it to before you can get matching ignoring case. (I realize that in Greek there are 2 lower case s’s, but there are no license id’s with Greek letters and there IS a way to deal with that anyway, so that’s not relevant.) The “licensee” gem could reply with a new “SPDX” field that returned the mixed-case string value, while doing lookups on all lower case. --- David A. Wheeler Intel Deutschland GmbH Registered Address: Am Campeon 10-12, 85579 Neubiberg, Germany Tel: +49 89 99 8853-0, www.intel.de Managing Directors: Christin Eisenschmid, Christian Lamprechter Chairperson of the Supervisory Board: Nicole Lau Registered Office: Munich Commercial Register: Amtsgericht Muenchen HRB 186928
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