On Dec 17, 2007 10:17 PM, sebb <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Regardless of the outcome, I think that there are problems with > generating the NOTICE and LICENSE files automatically. Unless the > project is pure ASF, there are additional items that may need to be > added to the N & L files. In any case, I think it's important that > these files are carefully considered to ensure that the required > entries are present. This is difficult if not impossible if the > contents of the N & L files are automatically generated.
Generating those files based on some knowledge of the project is something that SHOULD be allowed. For instance, the Wicket project generates the root NOTICE file from sub projects' notice files inside the source tree. This generated file is distributed inside our tar balls and zip files. The same strategy can be applied to the license file. The reason being that dependencies are typically managed at a local level in a multi-module project. Administering the NOTICE and LICENSE files locally is more convenient and less likely to get out of date than putting everything in a central file by hand. (As an aside, Wicket does store the generated files in a separate release branch in the svn repo, but not in the root of trunk). The question is not about wether generating these files is good or not. It is whether svn MUST mirror the released artifact. In my opinion that is not the case: building the distribution should be reproducible based on the release tag. How projects implement that is their prerogative. As incubator we don't have to prescribe these minutiae, but provide oversight on actual distributed artifacts. These are the zips and tarballs our podlings provide. IMO dictating a release procedure is stepping across the boundaries of what a podling/project can evolve themselves. The N & L files are unlikely to change frequently, so it really does > not save much work (if any) to create them by hand. Having them in the > top-level SVN directory seems sensible to me. But sensible does not policy make: I find it sensible to use maven for building a release, but I wouldn't turn that into policy. Martijn -- Buy Wicket in Action: http://manning.com/dashorst Apache Wicket 1.3.0-rc2 is released Get it now: http://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi/wicket/1.3.0-rc1/
