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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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Automatic license detection in Perl distributions 2 Comments More | Login | Reply /

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  • In the Debian pkg-perl group, we extensively use a tool developed by us called dh-make-perl, that creates the basic skeleton of a Perl package ready to be assimilated. One of our core requirements is to have the proper copyright information - As often as possible, we take the information from META.yml - but it's often not specified, or even worse, is completely bogus (i.e. META declares one license but a different licensing is explicitly mentioned elsewhere.
    You can take a look at our (quite ugly, yes) dh-make-perl [debian.org]. It tries to get this information from META.yml, then from several popular files (i.e. LICENSE, COPYING, etc.), and from the module's POD. And, of course, it goes on to create a machine-parsable debian/copyright file [debian.org] (of course, machine-parsable according to our sick and twisted standards).
    I looked a bit into CPAN modules offering this functionality, but found nothing. If you think it's worth it, I can weed it out of dh-make-perl and make it into its own module.

    • I skimmed the code, and maybe it's what I need. If you guys are using it to guess the license, you're probably doing the same thing I am. I'll look more closely in a few days.

      Did the debian people steal ideas from anyone else? Do the other linux distros do this too?

      Thanks,

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