[Hawkular-dev] How to work with the license plugin

Hi *, Have you ever updated the copyright range after you changed a file? To spare us from the tedious manual work and to bring in consistency and standards required by Red Hat Legal dept., the license plugin was recently included [1] in metrics. Other projects will follow soon. Here here is a couple of recommendations how to work with the plugin: (1) Having the file templates up to date in your IDE can save you some work git clone https://github.com/hawkular/hawkular-build-tools.git cd hawkular-build-tools/ide-configs ... and import what is there. If your IDE is not supported, you are welcome to contribute a configuration. Nevertheless, one can work without an IDE support, see (2). (2) The license plugin is able to add/fix licenses as necessary. Just invoke mvn license:format in the root of your project (assuming license plugin is configured in the pom hierarchy.) (3) The license:check goal is now bound to validation phase in metrics. It can make your build fail. If you want to avoid the checks for any reason (reduce build time, known temporary inconsistencies, ...) feel free to build with -Dlicense.failOnMissing=false But note that Travis will fail if you push files that do not meet the standards. (4) From my sustaining engineer's experience, I can say that it is often handy to have non-code changes in separate commits. This holds not only for code formatting but also for copyright range updates. Please keep them separate if possible. A typical workflow might look like this: (i) code, build with -Dlicense.failOnMissing=false, commit as many times as you need (ii) mvn license:format; git commit -m "License headers added or fixed" (iii) git push ... ; hub pull-request ... Thanks, Peter [1] https://github.com/rhq-project/rhq-metrics/pull/132