No license information generated?

[garydgregory]

Hello from Apache Commons,

I tried generating a CFF for https://github.com/apache/commons-io but what I got did not include the license field. Is this normal?

The license is defined in the POM of the parent's parent, the Apache root POM: https://search.maven.org/artifact/org.apache/apache/24/pom

TY

[thomaskrause]

Yes, this is not implemented yet but could be similarly implemented as for the license information of external dependencies. We can't directly use the license field of the pom because CFF requires SPDX identifiers, a requirement not found in the pom. Also, we would need to check if e.g. a license-url field already exists because we want to avoid having a mismatch between both these fields.

As a workaround, you can add the license information once to the CITATION.cff file manually. When the cff:create goal is executed, all existing fields are kept as they are. Only non-existing fields are overwritten (especially the author list, since this information might change more frequently).