Europa people,
After our successful (green) Europa RC1 build was promoted, I installed
a new legal/license file checker tool in the Europa-matic tool chain.
As a consequence, almost all projects are failing the build. (See the
status and details for each of your projects on the build status web
page.) In addition, I will be entering bugs against each project
for these license issues.
Here are the rules/constraints:
- Every plug-in must have an about.html and it must be as described
on the Eclipse
legal website.
- A small number of projects have incorrectly worded about files.
- A larger number of projects have correctly worded about files,
but with old dates on them. The date must be some time in June 2007
(I've arbitrarily chosen June 5, 2007, but the tool supports "any date
in June 2007" as valid). The idea here is that the date on the about
files is approximately the date of the release - just as one updates
all the copyright headers from 2000-2006 to 2000-2007, one must also
update all the about.html files to the current date.
- Some number of projects used Microsoft Windows copy-paste to
create their about files and copied a unicode apostrophe character
instead of an ASCII one. The tool notes this situation so that you can
fix it. (And you should/must fix it so that the text displays correctly
on all platforms.)
- Every feature must have a license.html file.
- The license.html file must contain the full text of all the
applicable licenses for code in the feature.
- The license.html file must have a bulleted table-of-contents at
the top of the file listing all the licenses included in the file.
(This is new.)
- An example of this is coming soon.
- The existence or non-existence of the license.html file is
currently checked by the tool; the text of the license.html is not yet
checked but I hope to find a way to add that check this week.
- Every feature must have a license section in the feature.xml file
- The feature.xml must contain the full text of the Software User
Agreement from the Eclipse legal
website.
- It must also contain the same bulleted table-of-contents of
licenses at the top of the file.
- An example of this is coming soon.
- None of this is currently checked by the tool, but it will be
soon.
Tables of contents should look something like this:
Please let me know if you feel that the checker tool is incorrectly
flagging one of your features or plug-ins - obviously the tool is rote
and dull and not as creative as you or I and there may be valid
exceptions that I am not aware of.
These items are a MUST DO before any project can release in Europa even
the base platform and JDT projects. You may wonder if these is a change
from previous releases and, yes, it is, but only in the sense that in
previous releases we (the EMO) had no way to check these rules
automatically and thus we had to trust that all features and plug-ins
were correctly legalized. Fortunately for us (or unfortunately,
depending on which side of the work items you're on), we now have this
first tool of mine and so we can all correctly add the correct about
files, license files, and so on. While it would have been nice if I'd
had this in place earlier, RC2 is still a good milestone to do this
work because feature development should be over, bug fixes should be
winding down, and none of these files have any executable or
configuration information - just words.
- Bjorn
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