[Development] Documenting 3rd party code Qt

[Kai Koehne]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Development [mailto:development-bounces+kai.koehne=qt.io at qt-
> project.org] On Behalf Of Thiago Macieira
> Sent: Wednesday, July 20, 2016 6:57 PM
> To: development at qt-project.org
> Subject: Re: [Development] Documenting 3rd party code Qt
> 
> On quarta-feira, 20 de julho de 2016 11:13:39 PDT Kai Koehne wrote:
> > I had a look at SPDX, README.Chromium, debian/copyright (btw thanks
> > for the pointer!). In the end I went for a custom format, because they
> > all seem to not quite fit for our use case. Anyhow, it's easy to
> > extend licensescanner to generate other formats, too.
> 
> What's missing from SPDX and have you tried to talk to them about adding
> the missing information?

I'm not sure whether anything particular is missing in the standard - my best
guess is we could create a syntactically valid SPDX file containing the same
information that we currently have in the proposed qt_attribution.json file format.

However, SPDX is a standard for "software packages" - it would probably make
more sense to add an SPDX file for QtCore or even qtbase. Using a SPDX file for
a single file in 3rdparty feels a bit like a misuse. 

Also, the tools I found to process spdx files are written in Java, which I certainly 
do not want to add as a build dependency. This would mean we'd write a custom 
parser for the subset of SPDX we'd support.

In the end I concluded it's just easier to have a tailored format we have full
control over, but can be used as a source for generating SPDX/debian_copyright/...
files as they're needed. I'd be happy to have a discussion about this with
someone interested in this.

My proposal is to use the names and matching guidelines from
https://spdx.org/licenses/ though. 


Regards

Kai