J. Lovejoy: > 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?
Thanks, I like the idea that identifiers are case-insensitive, with best practice to *display* them in mixed case. That will avoid some mysterious non-matches. The one tricky issue is URLs and other situations where you can't just do a case insensitive match, and I think it's important to state an agreement on them. I think we should *encourage* systems to accept both mixed-case and all-lower-case in situations like URLs, but if they can practically pick only one, then they MUST at least support all-lower-case values (e.g., in the URLs). Using an all-lower-case convention makes it trivial to support case-insensitive matching, while using mixed-case makes case-insensitive matching impractical. I note that OSI supports both mixed-case and all-lower-case, so there's existing practice to justify this. FYI, for those who are curious: this question was kicked off by a discussion involving the 'licensee' program, issue #72: <https://github.com/benbalter/licensee/issues/72>. I'm hoping to read that data from 'licensee' (as implemented via the GitHub API) and use it for the Linux Foundation CII 'best practices badge', see <https://github.com/linuxfoundation/cii-best-practices-badge>. Thank you. --- David A. Wheeler _______________________________________________ Spdx-tech mailing list [email protected] https://lists.spdx.org/mailman/listinfo/spdx-tech
