On Wed, May 25, 2022 at 07:27:51AM -0500, Chris Adams wrote:
Once upon a time, Gary Buhrmaster gary.buhrmaster@gmail.com said:
The follow up suggested that the license field be differently formatted.
I disagree with such explanatory prefixes, as it requires yet more apps to parse/support various prefixes.
No, my suggestion of using "License: SPDX:<foo>" would not require any additional changes. Anything that cares about the License field will already need changes to recongize the SPDX values; this would just remove any ambiguity. And as very little parses the License field, so there's not some big effort to update required in any case.
Yes, the value of using SPDX is that it is an unambigious machine parseable format. If we don't have a way to determine whether a given Fedora specfile is using SPDX or legacy names, then we diminish the value of performing the change, because we remain ambiguous.
So using this suggestion of 'License: SPDX:<foo>' will be useful both for apps that are querying RPMs at runtime, and for ourselves as maintainers to know when all packages in rawhide have finished being converted by their maintainers and/or provenpackagers.
With regards, Daniel