How to generate REUSE/SPDX info for a git repo

Question

Intro

The REUSE tool from the REUSE project by the Free Software Foundation Europe allows to add, maintain and extract detailed copyright and licensing info on a fine-grained scale, and it does that using a format that is both human- and machine-readable. To me, it is excellent work they did there.

In the end though, it is statically tracked info, mostly stored in source file header comments, and as such, it has to be maintained, and - most importantly for existing projects - created. That can be an arduous, boring task to be done by hand, especially when one thinks that a lot of this info could be extracted from the git commit meta-data of the project.

Question

How to reduce the manual workload in initially annotating an already existing project with REUSE info?

Answer 1

I wrote the reuseify.sh BASH script for that purpose. Next to extracting and assigning the git author info, it also simplifies assigning licenses to groups of files using regexes.

Example usage:

cd my-git-project
reuseify.sh --init
# Manually edit file '.reuseify/license_rgxs.tsv'.
reuseify.sh
# Amend the created git commit with your favorite IDE or git GUI.