Moving towards SPDX Compliant Copyright Statements in PO Files

[Andreas Cord-Landwehr]

Hi Josep,

thank you for the feedback! So I understand, the typical use case is that are 
is usually only one (active) translator per PO file. So, for those files we do 
not have to bother with old format copyright statements and simply can switch.

Regarding your concerns:
1) At least for Lokalize it should be super easy to provide it via Flatpak and 
similar tools to enable translators on older/slower moving distros to easily 
use a modern version once PO files default to SPDX format.
2) If we have old and new copyright format in the same file or even with 
statements of the same author, this should be easily to fix by an update 
script. I can gladly support/provide such a script to help in this conversion.

At the moment, my main concern is to get the needed applications ready to be 
able to start introducing SPDX based copyright information per default. As I 
understand you, it is not a problem if we already now turn the switch in 
Lokalize to update copyright to SPDX for everybody who is using a very new 
version of Lokalize (so, the version in which the reference patch is first 
released).

If anybody else as concerns and remarks, please raise them. Since Gears 
feature freeze is already tomorrow, I am afraid that this change in Lokalize 
will be a topic for the 23.04 release anyways.

Cheers,
Andreas

On Freitag, 4. November 2022 20:01:46 CET Josep M. Ferrer wrote:
> El 3/11/22 a les 13:47, Andreas Cord-Landwehr ha escrit:
> > Hi, following up the discussion in the separate thread ("reuse compliance
> > and imported po/"), I need some input about the practical steps to
> > achieve this.
> > 
> > At [1] I have a merge-request prepared that updates Lokalize to:
> > - understand both, the "old" copyright statements and the "new" SPDX
> > copyright statements
> > - changes to SPDX copyright statements per default
> > 
> > The technical change here is the simple part, but we have to look into the
> > translation workflow, where I am not an expert. Essentially, we have two
> > main questions on table:
> > 
> > a) Is it acceptable to have a transition phase where we have both kinds of
> > copyright statements inside PO files because translators of the same file
> > use different tools/different versions of tools that do not yet all
> > support SPDX based statements? (please also say if there are more tools
> > additional to Lokalize, GTranslator and Poedit that we have to look at)
> 
>  From my POV, it's no necessary the transition phase: a single PO file
> must have the traditional copyright statement or the SPDX copyright
> statement, but no both. But other translation teams may have a different
> needs.
> 
> I've just tested an option in Pology suite
> (https://invent.kde.org/sdk/pology):
> 
> $ posieve set-header -scopyright:'SPDX-FileCopyrightText: 2021, 2022 Foo
> Name <foo at kde.org>' akonadi_knut_resource.po
> 
> And changed the old copyright statement to SPDF copyright. So, it's OK.
> 
> > b) Is it acceptable to only support forward migration from "old" to "new"
> > copyright statements and not the way back?
> 
> Also, from my POV, our team only need the forward migration.
> 
> > And actually, are you OK with going towards SPDX based copyright
> > statements
> > our do you have any fundamental concerns? As Harald already said, it would
> > be a very big help for our automatic license/copyright check tooling
> > because most of the code already is ported to SPDX based statements.
> 
> I have some concerns:
> 
> 1) Some distros will ship a new Lokalize version in a year or two, with
> the SPDF compliant copyright statement. So, this movement will be slow.
> 
> 2) At some point, when all teams use SPDF compliant copyright
> statements, there will be PO files with old copyright statements ( some
> PO files untouched since a decade or more, or inactive teams). I
> understand there will be a massive migration. Is this assumption correct?
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> Josep M. Ferrer
> 
> > Best regards,
> > Andreas
> > 
> > [1]https://invent.kde.org/sdk/lokalize/-/merge_requests/22
> > 
> > PS: Yes, I deliberately only said "copyright" and not "license" for now,
> > because "license statements" will be a quite harder problem to tackle
> > because it is probably not a syntactical but a semantic change...