Using only the license checker about melpazoid

[riscy]

Neat, I'm excited to see those checks in Nix. They're sort of a hack (no syntax tree) but they seem to be useful.

Given what you write above, maybe it's time to split the license checker out into its own module that can be accessed through some CLI. Something like this?

python3 check_license.py </path/to/elisp/*.el> [--github-repo=optional]

[akirak]

maybe it's time to split the license checker out into its own module that can be accessed through some CLI.

Thanks, that's a good idea. Melpazoid looks like a complete suite for checking packages, but I don't have Docker on every machine, so I like to implement an alternative in Nix. Recently, Nix has got an elisp parser (written purely in the language), which makes it really a nice tool for Emacs developers. emacs-overlay is a hub for Nix + Emacs people.

Regarding use of the experimental checker from outside, I basically set noninteracrive to nil to disable other checks and and printed the contents of melpazoid-buffer to stdout. I transformed the output, but it's just a preference and not necessary. It's indeed a hack, but it was not hard at all.

[riscy]

This has been slow coming as I've been thinking about factoring stuff out, but I decided it'd be best to keep the file intact for now. I'm thinking of something like:

python3 melpazoid.py --license [target]

For your use case, were you thinking [target] would tend to be on the local file system, or a repository somewhere?

[akirak]

@riscy Thanks, I'm going to run it in a local working tree. It has a feature to clone remote repositories, but it's basically run locally: Repositories are first cloned using Nix to a read-only file system, and then copied to (actually symlinked) writable sandboxes. Only files specified in recipes are copied to sandboxes, so I'll probably run the license checker in the read-only Nix store before copying. It would be better if the license checker didn't involve any write operation, but there will be a workaround anyways.

Since I use niv to freeze dependencies in my Nix projects, your changes won't affect my project until I update the dependency. Please feel free to reorganise your project to your liking.

[riscy]

This is on master now.

[akirak]

Thank you for this work. It detected a license in my project, and its API is good to me. I also noticed some changes in the experimental checks, so I will update my project soon.