openSUSE packagers' take on the 3 month release cycle

[Parker Coates]

On Tue, Jul 9, 2013 at 9:14 AM, Vishesh Handa wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 9, 2013 at 4:13 PM, Scott Kitterman wrote:
>>> > These all have to be test compiled, checked for new or missing files,
>>> > checked for files that have moved between packages, checked for
>>> > license/copyright updates, etc.
>>>
>>> I guess you have all this mostly automagically done?
>>
>> Some yes, some no.  The copyright/licensing stuff is the hardest and it's very
>> manual.  It's work that has to be done to ensure we are legally distributing
>> the packages, so there's no way around it.
>
> Could you please elaborate why the licensing stuff cannot be automatically done?
>
> Most licenses follow a similar template. In fact most developers just
> copy paste the license (as they should). I can imagine writing a
> simple script the extract the copyright holder's name and type of
> license from any file. Maybe it would only work for 90% of the cases,
> but it should still work. And for that remaining 10%, you can always
> ask the developer to use a standard version of the license, thereby
> decreasing your work in the future.

There's already a Krazy check to detect acceptable licences.
Presumably that code would be a good starting point for such a script.

Parker