licensecheck: improvements

[Dmitry Smirnov]

Hello Benjamin,

On Sun, 11 Nov 2012 10:33:56 Benjamin Drung wrote:
> sorry for the long delay. I was at UDS and busy afterwards.

No worries, I was quite busy myself lately...


> > 
> > That's easy to fix by reordering sections in POD, we just need to put
> > VERSION before LICENSE.
> 
> Even then the first line will state only "Version:".

I don't understand... I have licensecheck with this change and it prints the 
following directly from POD:

----
Version:                                                                                                                                                                               
    licensecheck version ###VERSION### from the Debian devscripts package.                                                                                                             
                                                                                                                                                                                       
License:                                                                                                                                                                               
    Copyright (C) 2007,2008 Adam D. Barratt <*adam at adam-barratt.org.uk*>;                                                                                                              
    based on a script of the same name from the KDE SDK by                                                                                                                             
    <*dfaure at kde.org*>. This program comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. You                                                                                                            
    are free to redistribute this code under the terms of the GNU General
    Public License, version 2, or (at your option) any later version.
----

What's the problem?


> I don't like having the test in the user installed system. It makes the
> package bigger.

I don't see a problem here. We're talking kilobytes...


> 
> > > shunit2 is not bound to a specific language. I could rewrite
> > > licensecheck in another language and still use the test cases.
> > 
> > IMHO language-agnotsic argument is irrelevant even *if* we were going to
> > rewrite using different language.
> 
> Why? I once rewrote distro-info in another language. Having a
> language-agnotsic test suite was a benefit. I didn't had to rewrite the
> tests and I was able to make sure that the user didn't noticed a
> difference.

Assuming we'll make a significant progress with licensecheck, the likely 
course of its development would be separating license detection logic into 
standalone module. In this case native tests will be a plus.


> 
> I have nothing against having additional Perl tests that test internal
> stuff of licensecheck. These test should be more specific than what
> shunit2 tests.

Not necessarily. Licensecheck may be potentially useful outside Debian and 
even outside devscripts -- that's what I had in mind when I decided to use 
native tests bundled.

Just one file with all documentation and tests included may be considered 
useful for other projects and developers.


> 
> PS: We disagree on some points, 

No worries, I see most of our disagreements are regarding unimportant things. 
If you want only "shunit2" tests for now you can just ask and I will comply 
even though I'd prefer a different approach.

I think the way how licensecheck prints its output for "--help" and "--
version" do not qualify for disagreements. 
You merely don't want to change the output in any way while I'm ready to 
adjust it for the benefit of code.


> but I do not want to discourage your work on licensecheck. 

Thank you.

I find the poor timing the most discouraging. For example you positively 
replied to "new BSD detection algorithm" exactly one month ago and nothing 
happened. 

Unlike polishing the code or changes to --help/--version output
it is and important patch and there were no disagreement.

Even if you commit it tomorrow I can hardly work by making one patch per month 
when I was planning to do this on daily basis.

Now I just switched to other issues and obviously licenscheck improvements 
will continue to cripple while it kept behind "iron curtain".

From my prospective I found it difficult to continue this struggle if work 
can't be done in a timely manner. I'd rather allocate few days or even week to 
work on licensecheck exclusively than risk loosing context while prioritising 
with other issues while commit only occasionally or rarely.

It will be much more productive if you could allow me to do the work in 
dedicated branch from which you could pick the improvements to "production" 
version. Anyway I'm starting to doubt that it is possible to introduce all the 
improvements I'm thinking about without forking licensecheck or even writing 
it again from scratch.


> There are other things that I would love to apply
> a patch (for example, using DEP-5 license names or creating a DEP-5
> copyright template).

I'd very much like to do this work as soon as time allows.
There is a big space for improvements and I'm looking forward the time when 
I'll be able to work on this.


Regards,
Dmitry.