REUSE alpha release: v3.1.0a1

Yesterday I released v3.1.0a1 of the REUSE tool. It is an alpha release for the soon-to-be-released REUSE Specification v3.2, which can be found in its current state at this link.

The biggest change is the introduction of REUSE.toml, a configuration file that replaces the soft-deprecated .reuse/dep5. This configuration file allows you to declare the copyright and licensing of files (and globs of files) relative to the file. The important distinctions from .reuse/dep5 are:

• you can place the REUSE.toml file anywhere in your project;
• you can declare the precedence of information in case REUSE.toml disagrees with the contents of the file;
• and, because REUSE.toml is just a TOML file, you can add any other metadata that you want.

Because this is an alpha release, the accompanying documentation is not yet easily discoverable, but it is (in the process of being) written. Below some links:

• The new REUSE Specification v3.2 https://reuse.software/spec-3.2/
• An updated FAQ (under construction) https://github.com/carmenbianca/reuse-website/blob/3.2-improvements/site/content/en/faq.md
• The tool documentation https://reuse.readthedocs.io/en/v3.1.0a1/
  • New man pages https://reuse.readthedocs.io/en/v3.1.0a1/man/index.html
  • The change log https://reuse.readthedocs.io/en/v3.1.0a1/history.html
• The alpha release on PyPI https://pypi.org/project/reuse/3.1.0a1/

The purpose of the alpha release is to collect feedback on the newly implemented (and defined) REUSE.toml. If you have some spare time to take a look at this, you can convert your .reuse/dep5 file to REUSE.toml using reuse convert-dep5, and you can e-mail me at carmenbianca@fsfe.org, write to reuse@lists.fsfe.org, or create issues against the reuse-tool or reuse-website repositories. (Some day soon I’ll finally be able to move those repositories away from GitHub, inshallah.)

In the near future, after this is properly released, I want to look at creating a lint-file command for linting individual files instead of the entire repository (for better pre-commit integration), and I want to see if I can create a pre-commit hook that automagically adds REUSE information to touched files.