[Reuse] REUSE tutorial

[Carmen Bianca Bakker]

Some quick thoughts for the mailing list:

Je ĵaŭ, 2019-04-25 je 07:40 +0200, Carmen Bianca Bakker skribis:
> Je mer, 2019-04-24 je 12:57 -0700, Luis Villa skribis:
> > Hey, Carmen- [+work email]
> > Great meeting you in Barcelona! 
> > 
> > Couple of observations on Reuse; feel free to share (or point me to a better discussion forum):
> > As we already discussed, "why" would be good. Eventually, to be transparent, I think one reason "why" could be "Tidelift's customers will pay you, through Tidelift, to do it".

Rationales need to be visible on the websites. I think the tutorial
should be as short as possible, though. But perhaps one short, quippy
line?

> > Wildcards/patterns would be really good to have formally in the spec somewhere, so that (at least as a default) something more powerful than per-file could be used. I think you mentioned that's currently possible via debian packaging formats but extracting that out would be useful.

Done

> > It'd be good if the documentation mentioned what tools actually pick up Reuse metadata. eg, my understanding is that Valid-License-Identifier is a Reuse-specific extension and so may not get picked up by all scanners? If it is picked up by many major scanners, it'd be good to say that!

Good idea. Maybe upstream Valid-License-Identifier to SPDX?

> > Should it have a concept similar to ClearlyDefined's facets? I think it'd be useful to be able to not just say "this file is CC-BY", but "this file is CC-BY and a documentation file", or rather than "this file is proprietary" instead "this file is proprietary and a test file". Both of these are common situations that metadata would help scanners to analyze and deal with, and that upstream maintainers are best positioned to analyze.

Basically a good idea, but would mess with the simplicity of REUSE.
Maybe like an optional config file such as the DEP5 file, that can mark
entire directories? But I think this is outside of the scope of REUSE.

> > Have you given any thought to how this meshes with SFLC's recommendations? Specifically, they recommend centralizing copyright notices, and that seems like something that might be worth incorporating somehow.

I think REUSE is doing the exact opposite, short of including the
license texts in a centralised location (LICENSES/). I'm not certain if
the approaches are inherently incompatible, or whether something can be
done here.

Carmen
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