Add external references support about specification

[msymons]

As it stands, the RFC defines external references for components. Would it be possible to also have references for the BOM as a whole?

Thus, issue-tracker would reference the project issue tracker URL. This gives the potential for automatically generating issues based on BOM analysis.

If the above makes sense, I suggest that "build-system" (ciManagement) should also be included. This will allow automatic linking back to the where the BOM was generated (eg, Jenkins), One use case: investigate why a BOM has not been updated for a week.

[stevespringett]

Thats a really good idea and use-case.

[msymons]

Glad you like it!

I know that the CycloneDX specification is supposed to be lightweight... but another useful component reference (although I can only really speak from the perspective of Maven) would be "scope". ie, test, compile, etc,

Currently, default behaviour in BOM generation is to exclude test scope. This gives the benefit that downstream analysis is not "polluted" by components that are not part of deliverables... but the disadvatgae that one is not keeping track of use of an 8 year old version of seleniumHQ (or whatever).

The exact same challenge also affects commercial tools, many of which cannot tell the difference between scopes, meaning that it is easier to just exclude them entirely (or perform a whole bunch of manual triage).

By including scope in the BOM it would then be possible for downstream tools to analysis everything in a project, and provide the opportunity to apply different policies depending on the scope. eg:

• component with license x is banned if "scope = compile" but allowed if "scope = test".
• component with any scope might be covered by policies that deal with operational risk (component age)
• etc

[stevespringett]

Scope is already part of the specification. Refer to https://github.com/CycloneDX/specification/blob/master/schema/bom-1.0.xsd#L46

The definition of scope currently is limited to 'required' and 'optional'. I think adding a 'test' scope would be a good addition.
https://github.com/CycloneDX/specification/blob/master/schema/bom-1.0.xsd#L155

I do not think any of the implementations (maven, npm, pypi, nuget) actually use it or populate it this field. This is likely an enhancement that should be made to each of the implementations.

[stevespringett]

On second though, I think an 'excluded' value for scope makes more sense, since components could be excluded for all kinds of reasons, including unit and integration tests.

#9

[stevespringett]

Included in CycloneDX 1.1

[lock]

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