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Render ASF LICENSE and DEPENDENCIES files from SPDX license data

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
48/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Active
Tech stack
java
Domain
build-system, documentation

Research direction

The issue points to three linked PRs (#319–#321) and the LICENSE and DEPENDENCIES templates in apache/maven-apache-resources. First check those PRs and how the templates use $spdx.preferred and $spdx.unresolved; then identify the remaining work for headings, stable per-license file names, and rendering ASF resource bundles. Done means the templates use SPDX data while retaining declared license names for unresolved dependencies.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

enhancement

#316 gives templates an SPDX ID and a preferred license per dependency (#319, #320, #321). This issue tracks what the plugin still needs so that ASF bundles can render LICENSE and DEPENDENCIES files from it.

Plan

Each item is its own PR, linked here.

  1. Headings and file names. Add $spdx.title($id) for a heading such as "BSD 3-Clause License", and a stable file name per ID for templates that point at per-license text files, as Spark's LICENSE-binary does with its licenses-binary/ directory. The texts stay with each project.
  2. ASF resource bundles. Once a release contains #319 to #321, use $spdx.preferred in the DEPENDENCIES and LICENSE templates of apache/maven-apache-resources, keeping the declared license names for dependencies that $spdx.unresolved returns.

Out of scope

  • Checking LICENSE against what a distribution bundles. The licensing how-to scopes LICENSE to the distribution: "Do not add to LICENSE and NOTICE dependencies which are not in the distribution. Only bundled bits matter" (licensing-howto). A check of that has to read the built artifact, as Kafka verify_license.py, Pulsar CheckBinaryLicenseTask.kt and Flink's JarFileChecker.java do. This plugin renders before packaging. To narrow $projects to what a module bundles, use the existing includeGroupIds, excludeArtifactIds and scope filters.
  • Failing the build on a license. The License Maven Plugin has failOnBlacklist and include and exclude lists, and its master adds forbidden and problematic license classes (LicenseClassifier.java, since 2.8.0, unreleased as of 2.7.1).
  • NOTICE aggregation. The shade plugin's ApacheNoticeResourceTransformer already merges bundled NOTICE files.
Dominant language
Java
Stars
17
Forks
20
Avg merge
12h 3m
Merged PRs (30d)
22

Getting set up

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First steps

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  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

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