[Rpm-metadata] metadata script and sample

Malcolm Tredinnick malcolm at commsecure.com.au
Sat Oct 4 01:30:28 UTC 2003


On Sat, 2003-10-04 at 08:42, Joe Shaw wrote:
> On Fri, 2003-10-03 at 11:18, Mark Hatle wrote:
> > jbj asked me to suggest some constraints on a license field.
> 
> I think having constraints is a bad idea, although it's probably a good
> idea to have a convention.
> 
> Ximian ships a number of proprietary third-party packages with its
> professional version of its desktop.  Most of these include specific
> licenses and it's necessary for us to display them to the user (and
> require agreement) before the packages are installed.  So it's important
> to name them uniquely in such a way that we can identify them with some
> additional metadata (which for us is a separate file which contains the
> text of the licenses).  I would hate for those to be considered invalid
> under this format.

Another point against enumeration / restriction is that the field of
possibilities is just not stable enough. For example, the Monta Vista
list that Mark posted does not include the AFL (Academic Free License)
or the OSL (Open Software License), both of which are recent licenses
but are being used in a number of projects. Having to lump all those
into "Other" loses the point of having a license field after a while.

It is just not easy to add things to the enumeration: you end up having
to have a version number somewhere and then every man and their dog will
end up with a different version of the file on their system after a
couple of years. Lots of fun in an heterogeneous environment. :-(

> > The "/" indicates that the package either contains things licensed by 
> > and/or the listed licenses.
> 
> If we're using a structured format such as XML, I think we should
> probably use its structure instead of defining "/" as a convention. 
> That way validators can, well, validate it and the tag is truly a fully
> free-form field.  We could do either:
> 
> <package>
>   ...
>   <license>MPL</license>
>   <license>GPL</license>
>   ...
> </package>
> 
> or
> 
> <package>
>   ...
>   <licenses>
>      <license>MPL</license>
>      <license>GPL</license>
>   </licenses>
> </package>

Both styles have their pluses and minuses for parsing in a program, but
I like this idea. I probably have a slight preference for the former
style, since it's simpler.

Cheers,
Malcolm





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