Allow licenses to be specified during `cargo new` #2013

pwoolcoc · 2015-09-30T16:49:06Z

This pull request would allow a user to specify a license to include
with their project. If the user specifies a license, a line is added
to Cargo.toml specifying the license, and in the case of some
licenses, the actual LICENSE file is added to the initial project.

A user can put their choice(s) of license in a .cargo/config file,
like so:

[cargo-new]
license = "MIT/Apache-2.0"

or it can be specified on the command line when a project is created:

$ cargo new project-name --license "MIT/Apache-2.0"

There are 5 licenses that I have included the actual LICENSE files for:

MIT
Apache-2.0
BSD-3-Clause
MPL-2.0
GPL-3.0

If the user chooses any of these licenses, the corresponding LICENSE
file is generated and added to their project. In the case of multiple
licenses, each LICENSE file has a suffix added to the file name. So,
if a project was dual-licensed "MIT/Apache-2.0", their project would
include the files LICENSE-MIT and LICENSE-APACHE-2.0.

If the license is not one of these, the entry is still added to
Cargo.toml, and a LICENSE file is still added to the repository,
though it is content-less.

rust-highfive · 2015-09-30T16:49:17Z

r? @alexcrichton

(rust_highfive has picked a reviewer for you, use r? to override)

pwoolcoc · 2015-09-30T17:00:42Z

I did a short survey of the licenses used in projects on crates.io while I was preparing this PR, in case you wanted some reasoning about why I included the licenses I did: http://paul.woolcock.us/posts/crates-io-license-survey.html.

I added the GPL to the list after some feedback on the article.

alexcrichton · 2015-09-30T21:20:27Z

Whoa! This is awesome, thanks for doing this @pwoolcoc! Some thoughts of mine:

An unknown --license may want to generate an error rather than an empty license file, but perhaps --license-file and [cargo-new.license-file] could be supported options as well? That corresponds to what the manifest accepts as well at least.
Things like the MIT license need a year/copyright holder name, and it looks like those aren't filled in just yet?
Perhaps all the licenses could be pre-formatted to an 80-character line limit?
I wonder if we may want to start warning on a missing --license parameter perhaps?
Could you also update the documentation about configuration, and perhaps even about cargo new to indicate that a license is possible to pass?

cc @brson, @wycats, sure you guys will have opinions as well!

brson · 2015-09-30T21:27:28Z

Like the idea. Agree that bogus licenses should generate an error.

Since this includes a bunch 3rd-party text in the product, I am wondering what the copyright status of the licenses themselves is, and how that impacts Cargo's licensing. This isn't a question I've ever considered before.

eefriedman · 2015-09-30T22:57:31Z

The license for the GPL is "Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.".

apasel422 · 2015-10-01T21:19:47Z

Perhaps the license files that contain copyright year and holder information could be modified to use the formatting syntax like

Copyright (c) {year} {holder}

along with a method like

impl License {
    fn write_text(&self, f: &mut std::fmt::Formatter, year: u32, holder: Option<&str>)
        -> std::fmt::Result
    {
        match *self {
            License::MIT => write!(f, include_str!("../../../src/etc/licenses/MIT"),
                               year = year, holder = holder.unwrap_or("(Unknown)")),
            License::APACHE2 => write!(f, "{}", include_str!("../../../src/etc/licenses/APACHE2")),
            ...
        }
    }
}

in order to fill in the values where applicable.

bors · 2015-10-06T22:09:24Z

☔ The latest upstream changes (presumably #2022) made this pull request unmergeable. Please resolve the merge conflicts.

brson · 2015-10-08T18:16:41Z

@gerv I'm interested in your opinion about the legalities of bundling a bunch of license texts into Cargo, re my earlier comment.

gerv · 2015-10-14T17:43:19Z

License texts vary - some are "no modifications" (like the GPL), some are "you can make derivative works but you have to change the name" (like the MPL). However, license texts themselves are generally considered exceptions to a project's licensing policy, as long as they are distributable (as all open source license texts are). Some people argue that for software to be open source, it has to use a license whose text is itself open source, but that view is a minority one.

So I'd say bundle away. I think the license list you have is good - I certainly wouldn't add any others. The BSD license and the MIT license are equivalent in effect, and both are deprecated in favour of licenses which actually address patents specifically. The Rust license is partly MIT so you probably have to include that, but if you left out BSD-3-Clause, I would not weep a single tear. The licenses you have left - Apache -> MPL 2 -> GPL 3.0 - cover the broad spectrum of copyleft options pretty well.

Gerv

pwoolcoc · 2015-10-14T17:49:10Z

Thanks @gerv. I need to rebase this branch and finish off a couple minor things from @alexcrichton 's list, and then I will ask about getting it merged again.

sfackler · 2015-12-19T18:45:19Z

Have you had a chance to get back to this @pwoolcoc?

pwoolcoc · 2015-12-20T02:36:10Z

Yea, I mentioned in #rust yesterday that I am just getting back to this. I am working on this tonight a bit, hopefully I can get it merge-able either tonight or tomorrow.

This pull request would allow a user to specify a license to include with their project. If the user specifies a license, a line is added to `Cargo.toml` specifying the license, and in the case of some licenses, the actual `LICENSE` file is added to the initial project. A user can put their choice(s) of license in a `.cargo/config` file, like so: ```toml [cargo-new] license = "MIT/Apache-2.0" ``` or it can be specified on the command line when a project is created: ```bash $ cargo new project-name --license "MIT/Apache-2.0" ``` There are 5 licenses that I have included the actual LICENSE files for: * MIT * Apache-2.0 * BSD-3-Clause * MPL-2.0 * GPL-3.0 If the user chooses any of these licenses, the corresponding `LICENSE` file is generated and added to their project. In the case of multiple licenses, each `LICENSE` file has a suffix added to the file name. So, if a project was dual-licensed "MIT/Apache-2.0", their project would include the files `LICENSE-MIT` and `LICENSE-APACHE-2.0`. If the license is not one of these, the entry is still added to `Cargo.toml`, and a `LICENSE` file is still added to the repository, though it is content-less.

…ense files

pwoolcoc · 2015-12-20T06:03:10Z

An unknown --license may want to generate an error rather than an empty license file, but perhaps --license-file and [cargo-new.license-file] could be supported options as well? That corresponds to what the manifest accepts as well at least.

I have implemented both these.

Things like the MIT license need a year/copyright holder name, and it looks like those aren't filled in just yet?

Done.

Perhaps all the licenses could be pre-formatted to an 80-character line limit?

Done.

I wonder if we may want to start warning on a missing --license parameter perhaps?

Haven't touched this, as I didn't see any additional feedback about this.

Could you also update the documentation about configuration, and perhaps even about cargo new to indicate that a license is possible to pass?

I think I got all the docs updated, let me know if I missed something.

pwoolcoc · 2015-12-20T06:03:20Z

r? @alexcrichton

alexcrichton · 2015-12-21T17:12:21Z

src/cargo/ops/cargo_new.rs

+        Some(s) => {
+            let r = &s[..];
+            let mut licenses: Vec<License> = vec![];
+            for lic in r.split("/") {


This logic happens in a few places, perhaps it could be consolidated?

alexcrichton · 2015-12-21T17:15:15Z

src/cargo/ops/cargo_new.rs

@@ -99,6 +166,15 @@ fn existing_vcs_repo(path: &Path, cwd: &Path) -> bool {
    GitRepo::discover(path, cwd).is_ok() || HgRepo::discover(path, cwd).is_ok()
 }

+fn file(p: &Path, contents: &[u8]) -> io::Result<()> {
+    try!(File::create(p)).write_all(contents)
+}


There should be a helper function in util::paths for this I believe

alexcrichton · 2015-12-21T17:21:35Z

The logic here for writing out the LICENSE file itself makes me a little uncomfortable, but I'm not sure if there's much we can do about it. It definitely seems to be standard practice to have a file like that, but it involves Cargo parsing licenses and emitting files, both of which are a little unfortunate.

I'd love to take a more conservative approach to start off with by not worrying about foo / bar licenses or things like that and instead just emit one LICENSE file if the string is recognized, and perhaps emitting a warning otherwise. I'm not sure how feasible that'd be though?

pwoolcoc · 2015-12-21T17:37:13Z

I will remove the foo/bar stuff, if necessary, but I had originally implemented it because of the prevalence of the MIT/Apache-2.0 licensed projects on crates.io. I am afraid that, if that is removed, this feature becomes a lot less useful.

gerv · 2015-12-29T13:57:18Z

MIT/Apache 2.0 is the license of Rust. It would be a very bad idea not to have that be an option (heck, even the default) for Rust project license generation.

tbu- · 2016-01-11T00:59:50Z

One possibility would be to special-case MIT/Apache 2.0 if you don't want to support dual-licensing in general.

alexcrichton · 2016-01-12T17:51:38Z

Hm yes in retrospect let's just special case the MIT/Apache-2.0 license for now. The error message can help guide towards that if it's what's intended, and we don't have to worry about parsing license strings in Cargo itself.

bors · 2016-01-24T19:08:47Z

☔ The latest upstream changes (presumably #2081) made this pull request unmergeable. Please resolve the merge conflicts.

vi · 2016-01-24T20:32:14Z

Shall I try adapting this for cargo init?

alexcrichton · 2016-01-25T18:23:11Z

@vi yeah I suspect that this would want to modify cargo init now as well, @pwoolcoc would you be ok rebasing this and addressing the last few comments?

pwoolcoc · 2016-01-25T18:31:36Z

@alexcrichton sure, I'll try to get back to this tonight.

ticki · 2016-02-17T14:32:31Z

src/cargo/ops/cargo_new.rs

+impl License {
+    fn write_file(&self, path: &Path, holders: &str) -> io::Result<()> {
+        let mut license_text: Vec<u8> = Vec::new();
+        let _ = self.license_text(&mut license_text, holders);


This isn't shouldn't be silently ignored.

alexcrichton · 2016-02-26T19:21:42Z

This has been inactive for some time now, so I'm going to close this, but feel free to resubmit with a rebase!

vi · 2016-02-26T20:12:05Z

Is it a good idea to "take over" and re-submit this thing myself instead of waiting for original author?

pwoolcoc · 2016-02-26T20:29:25Z

@vi FWIW, I don't have a problem with it if you pick it up -- I just haven't had a chance to get back to it, if you have the time & motivation, awesome!

vi · 2016-04-01T00:49:18Z

Is scanning existing LICENSE or COPYING file and filling in license: or license-file: in cargo init a good idea?

gerv · 2016-04-01T19:30:13Z

No. Detecting licenses is the task of a dedicated license scanner; you don't want to try implementing that code. :-) You'd be amazed at how many variants there are.

ticki · 2016-04-01T19:43:56Z

@gerv You can easily make a program covering 99% of all cases.

vi · 2016-04-01T21:18:58Z

@gerv, Maybe detect not the license itself, but just license file and then fill in license-file: COPYING?

gerv · 2016-04-01T21:56:43Z

Oh, I see. That seems less problematic if you just look for files called COPYING, LICENSE, LICENCE or the equivalent ".txt" versions.

rust-highfive assigned alexcrichton Sep 30, 2015

pwoolcoc force-pushed the add-license-config-to-cargo-new branch 2 times, most recently from 70d8bb5 to eca61d5 Compare September 30, 2015 19:06

pwoolcoc force-pushed the add-license-config-to-cargo-new branch from 59f2af7 to 0a27bde Compare October 6, 2015 02:28

apasel422 mentioned this pull request Dec 1, 2015

Show how to set license in guide's example #2169

Closed

Paul Woolcock added 6 commits December 19, 2015 21:37

Error out when an unknown license is passed in

fe0839a

Update some documentation and the shell completion files

5938a74

automatically write the year, and the copyright holders, into the lic…

8f3bed0

…ense files

Add --license-file option

10f423f

Reformat licenses to fit all lines into 80 columns

0d77f7e

pwoolcoc force-pushed the add-license-config-to-cargo-new branch from 0a27bde to 0d77f7e Compare December 20, 2015 05:40

alexcrichton reviewed Dec 21, 2015
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ticki reviewed Feb 17, 2016
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alexcrichton closed this Feb 26, 2016

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Allow licenses to be specified during `cargo new` #2013

Allow licenses to be specified during `cargo new` #2013

pwoolcoc commented Sep 30, 2015

rust-highfive commented Sep 30, 2015

pwoolcoc commented Sep 30, 2015

alexcrichton commented Sep 30, 2015

brson commented Sep 30, 2015

eefriedman commented Sep 30, 2015

apasel422 commented Oct 1, 2015

bors commented Oct 6, 2015

brson commented Oct 8, 2015

gerv commented Oct 14, 2015

pwoolcoc commented Oct 14, 2015

sfackler commented Dec 19, 2015

pwoolcoc commented Dec 20, 2015

pwoolcoc commented Dec 20, 2015

pwoolcoc commented Dec 20, 2015

alexcrichton Dec 21, 2015

alexcrichton Dec 21, 2015

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pwoolcoc commented Dec 21, 2015

gerv commented Dec 29, 2015

tbu- commented Jan 11, 2016

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bors commented Jan 24, 2016

vi commented Jan 24, 2016

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pwoolcoc commented Jan 25, 2016

ticki Feb 17, 2016

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vi commented Feb 26, 2016

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vi commented Apr 1, 2016

gerv commented Apr 1, 2016

ticki commented Apr 1, 2016

vi commented Apr 1, 2016

gerv commented Apr 1, 2016

Allow licenses to be specified during cargo new #2013

Allow licenses to be specified during cargo new #2013

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pwoolcoc commented Sep 30, 2015

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Allow licenses to be specified during `cargo new` #2013

Allow licenses to be specified during `cargo new` #2013