Re: [patch 0/9] scripts/spdxcheck: Better statistics and exclude handling

[Max Mehl <max.mehl@fsfe.org>]

Thank you for picking up the effort to add license (and perhaps also
copyright) info to all files in the Kernel. This, as you know, is also
working towards making the whole repo REUSE compliant [^1].

~ Thomas Gleixner [2022-05-16 12:27 +0200]:
> Finding files without SPDX identifiers is cumbersome with spdxcheck, though
> it has all the information required.
> 
> The exclude of files and directories is hardcoded in the script which makes
> it hard to maintain and the information cannot be accessed by external tools.

Unfortunately, excluding files (i.e. not adding machine-readable
license/copyright information to it) would also block reaching full
compliance with the REUSE best practices. Have you considered making
them available under GPL-2.0-only or a license similar to public domain
[^2]?

Regarding false-positives, e.g. in license-rules.rst, you could use the
brand-new feature that allows to ignore blocks of code (to be released
later this week) [^3]. I am aware that spdxcheck would not be able to
detect this, but using the REUSE helper tool [^4] could also be a
solution to scan for missing files.

Best,
Max


[^1]: https://reuse.software

[^2]: https://reuse.software/faq/#exclude-file

[^3]: https://github.com/fsfe/reuse-docs/pull/104/files

[^4]: https://github.com/fsfe/reuse-tool

-- 
Max Mehl - Programme Manager -- Free Software Foundation Europe
Contact and information: https://fsfe.org/about/mehl -- @mxmehl
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