Philippe Ombredanne [mailto:[email protected]]>

>Could this be simplified?
> I can see two use cases:
> 1. at the file or directory level, this is unlikely needed: just provide the 
> expression that applies there only e.g. to a doc or source directory in an 
> SPDX doc or a simple expression.

There's no "there" to be in.  People are trying to fill in a form, with a 
single string expressing the SPDX license expression.

> 2. for a top level package, would a notion of "licensing scope" be simpler 
> than a full conditional construct?
e.g. something like:
> 
> scope:doc GFDL and MIT
> scope:tools GPL-2.0+
> scope:library LGPL-2.1+

No, I think that's much worse.

The phrase "scope:doc" is not shorter nor less complicated than "IF DOC" or "IF 
DOCUMENTATION".  This alternative seems to imply semantically-meaningful 
newlines, which is *NOT* a feature of the current syntax, so this would be a 
*MUCH* more drastic change.  It also is too limited for future expansion - what 
if you want to handle nesting later?  How do you handle the "other than this 
scope" situation?

I think "IF..." is widely understood.  Lots of legal texts use them, and 
programmers know what they are :-).  If you want to use the keyword "DOC" 
instead of "DOCUMENTATION", that's fine.

If you want to prefer lower case for non-license keywords, that's fine.  Having 
all keywords in lower case might be a good idea anyway, to help make the 
keywords more distinct.  But that's a different question.

--- David A. Wheeler

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