~ 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@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