Support SPDX tag-value as an output format

[sschuberth]

It would be great if the SPDX tag-value format would be supported as an output format, see this example.

[pombredanne]

@sschuberth this makes perfect sense. (FWIW, I am after all one of the co-founders of SPDX: http://web.archive.org/web/20160617012420/https://spdx.org/about-spdx/what-is-spdx )

That said, @ah450 wrote this Python library for SPDX for the Google Summer of Code a few yeasr back (I was the mentor). See:

• http://git.spdx.org/?p=spdx-tools-python.git;a=summary
• https://github.com/ah450/spdx-tools-python

This is not up entirely to date with the latest spec and would likely require some work first but is a great base to start from.

And the general idea would be to have probably an external utility that takes scan results (or more generally the upcoming ABC data format to be pushed soo to https://github.com/nexB/aboutcode ) and converts that to SPDX (and the possibly the other around too).

@sschuberth Would you have some cycles to chip in may be?
@ah450 Do you think you could update your library to support the latest SPDX spec, at least the tag-value format?

[sschuberth]

@pombredanne I'd love to help, but don't have the time currently. Anyway it's good to see that you acknowledge this to be a meaningful feature.

[pombredanne]

@sschuberth no problem. In any case this is definitely in the roadmap: I just updated it: https://github.com/nexB/scancode-toolkit/wiki/Roadmap#data-exchange

[sschuberth]

@pombredanne I'm currently thinking about implementing this as a post-processing step to JSON output (similar to json2csv.py), not as a strictly separate format. That would have the advantage of being able to convert existing JSON files to SPDX files (if we expose the conversion via command line options). What do you think?

[pombredanne]

@sschuberth This makes perfect sense 👍

[sschuberth]

@pombredanne I've started to add some very basic SPDX tag / value output support based on spdx/tools-python#9 to ScanCode. Locally, I've simply copied the spdx directory into ScanCode's src directory. But in order to submit my changes to ScanCode we need to come up with something better. I guess working on spdx/tools-python#2 to publish the spdx-tools to PyPI is the way to go?

[pombredanne]

@sschuberth this is great!
let me push this to Pypi tomorrow. The spdx name has already been used unfortunately .... https://pypi.python.org/pypi/spdx/ so I suggest using spdx-python as a name.

[sschuberth]

I guess you mean spdx-tools like mentioned in the linked issue? I at least would prefer that name.

[pombredanne]

Actually spdx-tools is already the name... correct and a better one.

[pombredanne]

@sschuberth actually this is done: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/spdx-tools/ :P