I feel like we had this conversation before on this topic and David’s suggestion was raised, which I also agree with…. digging into meeting minutes I found:
- http://wiki.spdx.org/view/Technical_Team/Minutes/2014-09-16#Case_sensitivity_for_license_information - the tech team discussed this on 16 Sept 2014, note saying “License ID’s case sensitive” - and then the legal team discussed it - http://wiki.spdx.org/view/Legal_Team/Minutes/2014-09-18 - and concluded: • Mark raised issue of whether SPDX License List short identifiers and (new) license expression operators should be case sensitive with the Tech Team and discussed further here: decided that for purposes of spec, in terms of a legitimate value, both could be case insensitive (but best practice would be to display with precise capitalization). Mark to go back to tech team with this decision. So… looks like maybe we didn’t really capture this elsewhere? In any case, I don’t see a reason to have them be case sensitive in terms of matching (for tools), but have them display with the upper/lower case as they are shown in the SPDX License List - it’s easier for humans to read/spot :) What do we need to do to capture this and make any official changes? Jilayne > Message: 1 > Date: Fri, 13 Nov 2015 21:54:17 +0000 > From: Ben Balter <[email protected]> > To: "Wheeler, David A" <[email protected]>, "Gary O'Neall" > <[email protected]>, "[email protected]" > <[email protected]> > Subject: Re: Are SPDX license identifiers case-sensitive? > Message-ID: > <CANFb=ww9b9UCX-BCBdze=9z2+0jfgeqqetya3vtpkfsybhf...@mail.gmail.com> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" > > Realize Licensee is just one implementation, but completely agree with > everything David just described (downcased matching, mixed cased display). > > - Ben > > On Fri, Nov 13, 2015 at 4:44 PM Wheeler, David A <[email protected]> wrote: > >> 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 >> >> >> > _______________________________________________ Spdx-tech mailing list [email protected] https://lists.spdx.org/mailman/listinfo/spdx-tech
