Allow to match Copyright garbage by Regex patterns

[sschuberth]

Please have a look at the individual commit messages for the details.

[pombredanne]

It would super useful and likely more efficient if these garbage copyright could be reported upstream as bugs to ScanCode Toolkit where these will be fixed forever and everyone ;)

[sschuberth]

It would super useful and likely more efficient if these garbage copyright could be reported upstream as bugs to ScanCode Toolkit where these will be fixed forever and everyone ;)

We had this discussion internally already @pombredanne, and I actually believe the copyright garbage feature in ORT would not really be required all that much anymore with recent version of ScanCode. If we'd see the need to update / create a garbage file, we'd report that findings against ScanCode, rest assured 😉

[fviernau]

We had this discussion internally already @pombredanne, and I actually believe the copyright garbage feature in ORT would not really be required all that much anymore with recent version of ScanCode. If we'd see the need to update / create a garbage file, we'd report that findings against ScanCode, rest assured wink

I agree it is a good thing to fix things upstream. But not on the critical path of any compliance scan. This implies to me that ORT must provide means to make short term fixes on that critical path, so that issues can be fixed timely. While contributing back can be done when time permits. So, I disagree that this feature can be dropped as it provide means to zap out copyright statements, which is needed even though it's use becomes less and less frequent.

Regarding contributing back, @bennati would you consider contributing your ORG's garbage entries?

[bennati]

I agree, we cannot wait for scancode to fix the garbage issues, unless scancode fetches the latest rules from the online repo at each scan @pombredanne ?

Our garbage file was filled with findings by older scancode versions, would these help when used with newer scancodes?

[sschuberth]

would these help when used with newer scancodes?

Very likely not. Only those garbage findings that are still valid for the current ScanCode version would be helpful. Actually, to remove unneeded garbage entries, I personally think it makes sense to start from scratch with an empty file and add entries anew as needed.

[fviernau]

Our garbage file was filled with findings by older scancode versions, would these help when used with newer scancodes?

@pombredanne I believe this is for you. I presumed you could just put all garbage entries into a plain text file, run latest ScanCode against it and see which are still considered as copyrights statements. Which would be your list of bugs then. Does this make sense?

[fviernau]

Very likely not. Only those garbage findings that are still valid for the current ScanCode version would be helpful. Actually, to remove unneeded garbage entries, I personally think it makes sense to start from scratch with an empty file and add entries anew as needed.

Maybe we shouldn't assume that all users are on latest ScanCode version. As a compromise how about limiting it to
a min ScanCode version. E.g. add all garbage entries for ScanCode 3.x + but not for 2.x ?

[sschuberth]

Maybe we shouldn't assume that all users are on latest ScanCode version.

That's not what I'm assuming, but I am assuming that @pombredanne is only interested in issue reports against the latest ScanCode version; otherwise he'd first need to verify for each report if there's still something to fix with the latest ScanCode version.

[fviernau]

That's not what I'm assuming, but I am assuming that @pombredanne is only interested in issue reports against the latest ScanCode version;

I was proposing to contribute the copyright garbage to ort-config so these can be used to filter out copyright garbage by any ORT user. Apart from that, as I outlined here above [1] it may be possible to filter the entries for the latest scancode version, so that the whole list can be indeed useful for @pombredanne as input if the approach works out.

[1] #6592 (comment)

[sschuberth]

Ok guys, this discussion is getting too off-topic now from the topic of the original PR. Please consider continuing in our discussions forum.