ament_copyright failing to detect copyright in c style comment blocks about ament_lint

[tfoote]

The underlying cause appears to be that C style comments, /* , are not covered here: https://github.com/ament/ament_lint/blob/master/ament_copyright/ament_copyright/__init__.py#L314

This the copyright block is not considered a comment and not scanned for the copyright.

[dirk-thomas]

In order to keep the logic of this package simple it does not detect block comments. I don't think we should increase complexity for that but update the existing code to use non-block comments.

[tfoote]

We could make it the standard for all our new code. But we're already preferring the block quotes greping our current code base we have 36 instances of c-style copyright blocks and 0 instances of c++ style copyright blocks.

(r2) tfoote@yeti:~/work/r2/ros2_ws$ grep -rI Copyright * > /tmp/copyright
(r2) tfoote@yeti:~/work/r2/ros2_ws$ cat /tmp/copyright | grep "\*" | wc -l
36
(r2) tfoote@yeti:~/work/r2/ros2_ws$ cat /tmp/copyright | grep "//" | wc -l
0

Also important is that the c-style copyright and licenses has been the default template used throughout the ROS ecosystem already. Not fixing this would force anyone to change the license block on packages being ported. It's both a pain for anyone making the port as well as making a mess for checking licensing.

And lastly it should be true that if anyone embeds code it should be detected without modifications.

It will make the logic much simpler in this script, but that's making this tool not useful in many of our use cases.

[dirk-thomas]

We decided in today's meeting to not support block comments for now.

Therefore I would propose to close the ticket.

[tfoote]

Yeah, we can close it. It would be good to add comment to this effect in the documentation so people know it won't expect it to detect on c-style comments.

[dirk-thomas]

The PR extending ament_copyright to support licenses will contain a note in the documentation that block comments are not supported: https://github.com/ament/ament_lint/pull/15/files#diff-156d8d387088e2de200fc4c6f5bec6ecR47