Initial contribution of dash-licenses-wrapper

[marcdumais-work]

Description

This contribution provides a wrapper, to make it easier to integrate and run dash-licenses, in Eclipse Foundation projects repositories. It's mainly aiming to cover JavaScript and TypeScript projects, but might be usable in others too.

Once published to npm, the wrapper can be installed as a devDependency and used to run license checks locally on a developer's laptop and also as part of GitHub CI, using a provided example workflow file.

See README.md for more details

Testing

This contribution includes some minimal tests, run from a CI Tests GitHub workflow. There is a second 3PP License Check workflow that uses a trick to install the wrapper as a pseudo npm package and then run a license check, which gives a preview of what it will look-like when integrated to other projects/repos. Until this is published to npm, a similar trick could be used to install it temporarily, for a quick check.

I created a test PR on my fork so they would run. See the result of the workflow runs below:
CI Tests workflow
3PP License check workflow

Note: An earlier version of this contribution was first proposed as an addition to the dash-licenses repository but since there are no direct dependencies to that repo's content, it was deemed better to have it in on its own.

[waynebeaton]

IP Review initiated: https://gitlab.eclipse.org/eclipsefdn/emo-team/iplab/-/issues/11530

[marcdumais-work]

Oops - there was a left-over mention of the secondary license, left from the original Theia sources - corrected now. Can you re-run Scancode?

[marcdumais-work]

@waynebeaton friendly ping :)

[marcdumais-work]

@waynebeaton Any thoughts about how to proceed to publish this to npm? Does the project perhaps already have a npm organization or account?

If not, I could go ahead and create a free organization with an appropriate name (eclipse-dash?), temporarily add myself as a member and manually publish a first version of the package. Then, time permitting, I would try to figure-out automated publishing from CI if possible (from my fork first, where I can set GitHub secrets). In that scenario, I would plan to transfer ownership of the org to Webmaster, and let them manage it with the project's input. I have similarly transferred the Theia npm org a while ago. This approach would permit having this out ASAP and give me latitude to experiment with the automated publish setup, before handing-over the keys to the npm account.

However I am open to doing this however you think is best. WDYT?

[waynebeaton]

I have no relevant experience in this matter.

It seems to me that the path that you've charted is our best bet.