[REUSE] Addressing some papercuts in the specification

[Max Mehl]

~ Drew DeVault [2021-12-21 14:30 +0100]:
> Hi! I'm trying to adapt REUSE to my projects, but I find the per-file
> headers to be a bit verbose and uncomfortable to read or write. It seems
> that, on the spectrum from machine-readable to human-readable, these
> have landed too far to the former.

Compared with a compiled SPDX bill of material or some other rather
esoteric best practices, I still find REUSE very human-friendly ;)

But yes, keeping the balance between human- and machine-readability is
not trivial. I can well live with the solution REUSE found but may also
be *a bit* biased.

> I am instead using a modified approach in my projects, which, for
> example, looks like so:
> 
> // License-Id: GPL-3.0-only
> // Copyright: 2019 Drew DeVault <sir at cmpwn.com>
> [...]
> 
> Let's not get ahead of ourselves by prematurely over-namespacing
> everything. The current license headers read like an SPDX advertisement.

Well, you can do that, and it would fit the purpose of being
human-readable, but for machines it's only partly, and it would simply
not be fully compatible with REUSE.

The "SPDX-License-Identifier" is a well-known tag, understood by most if
not all compliance tools, and was therefore also a no-brainer for REUSE
to adopt. The copyright lines are completely fine, and the
SPDX-FileCopyrightText is just an alias. However, we chose to make it
the default because it avoid false-positives/negatives. In the tool,
that's easy to change [^1].

Best,
Max


[^1]: https://reuse.readthedocs.io/en/stable/usage.html#addheader

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Max Mehl - Programme Manager - Free Software Foundation Europe
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