Re: [PATCH 0/6] Address issues with SPDX requirements and PEP-263

From: Jonathan Corbet
Date: Sat Sep 07 2019 - 09:34:30 EST


On Thu, 5 Sep 2019 16:57:47 -0300
Mauro Carvalho Chehab <mchehab+samsung@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> The description at Documentation/process/license-rules.rst is very strict
> with regards to the position where the SPDX tags should be.
>
> In the past several developers and maintainers interpreted it on a
> more permissive way, placing the SPDX header between lines 1 to 15,
> with are the ones which the scripts/spdxcheck.py script verifies.
>
> However, recently, devs are becoming more strict about such
> requirement and want it to strictly follow the rule, with states that
> the SPDX rule should be at the first line ever on most files, and
> at the second line for scripts.
>
> Well, for Python script, such requirement causes violation to PEP-263,
> making regressions on scripts that contain encoding lines, as PEP-263
> also states about the same.
>
> This series addresses it.

So I really don't want to be overly difficult here, but I would like to
approach this from yet another angle...

> Patches 1 to 3 fix some Python scripts that violates PEP-263;

I just checked all of those scripts, and they are all just plain ASCII.
So it really doesn't matter whether the environment defaults to UTF-8 or
ASCII here. So, in other words, we really shouldn't need to define the
encoding at all.

This suggests to me that we're adding a bunch of complications that we
don't necessarily need. What am I missing here?

Educate me properly and I'll not try to stand in the way of all this...

Thanks,

jon