Authors, maintainers and licenses in apidox

[Alex Merry]

On 22/01/14 06:33, Kevin Ottens wrote:
> On Tuesday 21 January 2014 17:18:36 Alex Merry wrote:
>> Traditionally, the front pages of our apidox has included a list of
>> authors, the maintainer(s) and the license.  This is obviously
>> duplicating/summarising information stored elsewhere, and is easy to let
>> get out of date.
> 
> Yes... definitely easy to get wrong. We should have only one place for that.
>  
>> Do we still want this information?  It would probably mean adding it to
>> the README.md files.
> 
> Are we ditching the LICENSE and AUTHORS files which used to contain this type 
> of information? I'm not sure we want everything in README.md.

Well, this is kind of what I mean about duplicating the information.
Although the canonical authorship info is the copyright headers and/or
git log.

My personal view is that authors generally shouldn't be in the apidox
main page anyway, as it's not massively useful to users of the dox.
Authors on individual classes is more useful and more likely to be accurate.

Having the maintain there is a possibility, or we could just add a link
to the frameworks list with the canonical info to the Links section.

License is potentially useful.  Currently the docs do
@licenses
@lgpl
which gives something approximating the markdown
### License(s):
[LGPLv2](http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/lgpl-2.1.html#SEC1)

This is somewhat more succinct than the content of LICENSE tends to be
(where that file is even given; we currently don't bother with it if the
code is GPL or LGPL; in that case, we have COPYING or COPYING.LIB,
containing the full text of the license, instead).

I would be tempted to ditch the current LICENSE files (all three of
them), and add (summary) license info to README.md, as

> ## License
>
> This framework is licensed under the
> [LGPLv2](http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/lgpl-2.1.html#SEC1)

or

> ## License
>
> This framework is licensed under the @lgpl

(the latter depends on a doxygen command defined by kapidox).  We would
(have to) keep COPYING and COPYING.LIB regardless.  We might want to add
in a second sentence saying that the CMake code is licensed as BSD.

Currently there are a bunch of COPYING-CMAKE-SCRIPTS files around where
frameworks ship Find*.cmake modules, which I'm not so keen on
(especially as the BSD license text makes little sense unless it has a
copyright notice above it).

Alex