openSUSE packagers' take on the 3 month release cycle

[Scott Kitterman]

Vishesh Handa <me at vhanda.in> wrote:
>On Tue, Jul 9, 2013 at 4:13 PM, Scott Kitterman <kde at kitterman.com>
>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 I'd a licensecheck script that does this. It helps, but the results have to be checked and properly documented and so thete is still substantial manual work required. KDE packages are generally better about consistently documenting copyright and licensing, but we still find bugs and it's still a lot of work. 

Scott K