[Development] Support for *Notes and UpstreamFiles fields in qt_attributions.json files

[Kai Köhne]

Hi Eddy,

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Development <development-bounces at qt-project.org> On Behalf Of
> Edward Welbourne via Development
> Sent: Tuesday, February 14, 2023 3:14 PM
> To: Development at qt-project.org
> Subject: [Development] Support for *Notes and UpstreamFiles fields in
> qt_attributions.json files
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> Having taken part in various third-party updates and felt a need to leave notes
> for those who will do the same in future, I have run up against JSON not having
> a comment format.  To work round that, I propose to allow some fields to be
> included in a qt_attribution.json file for that purpose.  As a general pattern, I
> propose allowing ${Field}Notes for any ${FIELD} that already exists; and a
> separate UpstreamFiles field, corresponding to the Files one, to list where in
> the upstream source tree to find the files that are to be copied.

First, let's agree that JSON sucks for the task at hand. It doesn't have any explicit support for comments, and no support for multi-line strings (though our implementation tolerates this).

Anyhow, I wonder whether it wouldn't suffice to have _one_ comments field, instead of a dedicated UpstreamFiles field, and *Notes fields for every single entry. E.g.

{
  "Comments": [
     "Upstream files were copied from:",
     "   src/dir1, src/dir2",
     "The license and copyright was derived from dist/LICENSE.txt"
  ]
}

The benefit I see is that qtattributionsscanner (and any other JSON tool that might be used by others) has only to care about one additional field, not multiple ones.

Regards

Kai