Incomplete copyright & license statements in po files, deploying SPDX statements
Friedrich W. H. Kossebau
kossebau at kde.org
Wed Jan 24 23:33:17 GMT 2024
Hi,
while looking into making another KDE project REUSE compatible (what's that?
:) see links below) I found that when it comes to copyright & license
statements many translation catalog files currently offer chances for
improvements :)
My interest is:
would anyone from the translation teams have motivation & resources to
coordinate things here on the po files side of things?
About REUSE & SPDX:
* Initial related blog post:
https://cordlandwehr.wordpress.com/2019/12/01/the-road-towards-kf6-spdx-license-identifiers/
* Current related contributor How-To:
https://community.kde.org/Guidelines_and_HOWTOs/Licensing
* KDE licensing policy for translations:
https://community.kde.org/Policies/Licensing_Policy#Policy, item 7
I do not have time left myself, so just have hope to raise awareness and
perhaps have someone interested to learn something here while tackling it or
find other kind of satisfaction and pleasure in it :)
I cc:ed Andreas Cord-Landwehr as the initiator of REUSE with KDE for heads-up.
The perfect world would be this for what I understand:
* each po file has a dedicated license stated, matching KDE policies
* each po file has a complete copyright statement, with all authors
* those statements are done using SPDX identifiers
Right now a number of po files are sometimes missing any notes about copyright
or license, another number has incomplete information, and only a few are
already using SPDX statements.
Example:
liboktetacore.po has some translations with no statements, or some like
--- 8< ---
# Copyright (C) 2022 This file is copyright:
# This file is distributed under the same license as the okteta package.
# Automatically generated, 2022.
--- 8< ---
or
--- 8< ---
# Copyright (C) YEAR This_file_is_part_of_KDE
# This file is distributed under the same license as the PACKAGE package.
--- 8< ---
Not that perfect, isn't it :)
So the challenge to reach the perfect world might include
* decide on proper licenses per po file with all existing contributors
(note that catalogs sometimes cover multiple sources with different
licenses, e.g. projects with shared lib and plugins, sharing one catalog)
* complete the copyright statements with all correct information
* improve the tooling to ensure SPDX statements are used
(lokalize was said to already use SPDX now when writing files)
... and more that I might not think of right now, having only done
translations a few times :)
As result of the current state many of the projects which thought they are
REUSE compliant got some set back when the syncing of po files to the source
repositories had been introduced, with some po files not up to that.
People for now hacked around that on KDE CI by simply removing all catalogs
before running the REUSE compliance check:
--- 8< ---
- rm -rf po/ poqm/ # HACK some projects have po files committed. Those do
not have SPDX markers. Ignore them for now to avoid CI noise
--- 8< ---
See https://invent.kde.org/sysadmin/ci-utilities/-/blob/master/gitlab-templates/reuse-lint.yml#L10
So, anyone interested here to turn the "now" in that "for now" in that HACK
comment into a past? :)
Cheers
Friedrich
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