Re: Switching to SPDX license tags

[Thomas Klausner <wiz%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

On Thu, Feb 02, 2023 at 10:26:07PM +0100, Joerg Sonnenberger wrote:
> Am Thu, Feb 02, 2023 at 03:11:54PM +0100 schrieb Thomas Klausner:
> > I think it'd be useful to convert our licenses (LICENSE) to these
> > standardized identifiers. Perhaps url2pkg could even set it
> > automatically by looking for SPDX-License tags in the code,
> > e.g. these:
> 
> In my experience SPDX is nice for new code, but doesn't work that well
> for existing code bases. So while it would be nice to have some support
> e.g. in url2pkg or pkglint for scanning for SPDX identifiers and a tool
> to convert them to "our" names, I don't think batch converting is going
> to help much if at all.

There's two parts of the proposal:

a) switch to using SPDX in pkgsrc by default to sync up with the world
   outside

b) improving support for auto-recognizing licenses (we do have a
  'guess-license' target already).

I only plan on doing a)

I see that batch conversion might not be easy to do
correctly. Alternatively we could just warn in pkglint about 'old'
license names and let pkgsrc developers convert them manually.
 Thomas