Re: Compliance with Boost copyright and license guidelines

From: Hans Dembinski (hans.dembinski_at_[hidden])
Date: 2019-08-19 07:56:26

I fully support Paul's initiative to fix the copyright issues for the next release.

> On 18. Aug 2019, at 18:54, Paul A Bristow via Boost <boost_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> 
> 1 A boost/tools/inspect/develop branch to refine the inspect program a little and improve the documentation (I have done something on this already for my education and use).

I think this program should be rewritten in Python which would simplify maintaining and using it (no compilation needed, simpler code, Python's string processing is fast enough).

> 3 Encourage all authors to run inspect on their library locally and try to remedy the items missing.

I started to fix some copyright messages in Boost.Histogram, but there is still more to do.

> 4 I suspect that many libraries will have items missing but the authors are also missing.  So someone from the community maintenance team will need to take over and make some decisions on what to do.
> Often just providing a copyright claim from the obvious author and Boost license will suffice?

Sounds reasonable. In any case, we can already make a lot of progress by fixing all the libraries with have active maintainers and then worry about the others.

> 5 Try to improve the compliance with other guidelines.  For example. there are many libraries that are failing to prevent with min and max macros for what of a couple of brackets. Usually (std::numeric_limits<>::max)().  All these will trip up Windows users in a puzzling way.  Please can we just fix these?

The page http://boost.cowic.de/rc/docs-inspect-develop.html should link to the guideline that is violated, https://www.boost.org/development/requirements.html. I didn't understand what was meant at first.

> Views?

- For things like the min/max guideline, a tool that is clever enough to correctly find these issues could also just apply the fix directly in the code. The inspect tool could have a command line option to apply fixes as well or at least suggest the fixed code line.

- To give the inspection report more visibility, there should be an entry in the menu of www.boost.org. Under "Development" we currently have "Master Summary" and "Master Issues". There should also be "Master Inspection Report". And vice versa for "Development *".

Best regards,
Hans