This change log follows the Keep a Changelog spec. Every release contains the following sections:
Added
for new features.Changed
for changes in existing functionality.Deprecated
for soon-to-be removed features.Removed
for now removed features.Fixed
for any bug fixes.Security
in case of vulnerabilities.
The versions follow semantic versioning.
This is the change log for the REUSE Specification.
- Definition for Commentable and Uncommentable Files. Thanks @Jayman2000.
- Introduce support of in-line snippet comments using
SPDX-SnippetBegin
/SPDX-SnippetEnd
. - Specify encoding of
.license
files to UTF-8. Thanks @kirelagin. - Introduce
REUSE-IgnoreStart
/REUSE-IgnoreEnd
to make the REUSE helper tool not consider the enclosed content for detecting copyright and licensing information. - Definition for Covered File and clarify for which file copyright and licensing information is required. Tanks @Jayman2000.
- Remove SPDX documents from list of Covered Files.
- Remove symlinks and zero-byte files from list of Covered Files.
- Remove submodules and Meson subprojects from list of Covered Files.
- Clarify which license text files are needed if a SPDX license expression contains more than one license and/or exception.
- URLs to currently applicable SPDX specification.
- Define an order or precedence.
REUSE.toml
definition added.
- Allow
.license
files for commentable files, but strongly recommend adding copyright/licensing information in header. Thanks @Jayman2000. - Bump referenced SPDX version to 2.3, and update links.
- DEP5 deprecated.
- Minor typos and grammar mistakes. Thanks @jlovejoy and @Jayman2000!
- Improved definition of Copyright Notices.
COPYING
andLICENSE
are now marked as ignored, when they were already ignored by the tool since its inception.
This version was yanked soon after release after a new definition of the order of precedence broke compatibility.
SPDX-FileCopyrightText: Jane Doe
is now the recommended way to mark a copyright notice instead ofCopyright (C) Jane Doe
.Copyright
and©
are still supported as prefixes.- The specification now makes a recommendation on the format of copyright
notices, but does not mandate anything other than that the copyright notice
contain the name of the copyright holder. The format is roughly:
SPDX-FileCopyrightText: 2019 Jane Doe <[email protected]>
- An FAQ and much-needed tutorial are added to help people along, instead of letting the specification do double duty as a tutorial.
- The tool has been updated to be a lot friendlier to use, and to print more helpful linting output. In a future release it will automate some tasks (e.g., adding copyright and licensing information headers to specified files).
-
The DEP5 file which bulk-licenses directories as a sort of global configuration file was moved from
debian/copyright
to.reuse/dep5
. -
The three steps have been changed from
- Provide the exact text of each license used
- Include a copyright notice and license in each file
- Provide an inventory for included software
to
- Choose and provide licenses
- Add copyright and licensing information to each file
- Confirm REUSE compliance
- The specification no longer makes a recommendation on how to deal with licenses such as BSD and MIT that themselves contain editable copyright notices.
- License files can now only be placed in
LICENSES/[spdx-identifier].[ext]
files, instead of the defaultLICENSE
,COPYING
, etc.. As a result, theValid-License-Identifier
tag is no longer needed. - The specification no longer makes any mention of version control systems to track copyright.
- The specification no longer mentions a bill of materials (SPDX Document).