Don't break identifiers

[Floppy]

We rely on the license IDs that you define here for other apps. When they change (like for capitalisation, or renaming), it breaks things downstream that depend on them.

I accept renaming needs to happen, but when it does, perhaps older deprecated IDs could be kept around with some sort of link to the new ID in its JSON representation?

[rufuspollock]

@Floppy absolutely - we need to redirect / alias and have a proper deprecation process.

[Floppy]

Proposed a JSON representation for the deprecated IDs in #38

[rufuspollock]

Great. Just as a BTW you may be interested in the proposal in okfn/opendefinition#7 (note we will promise no breakage - e.g. redirects will be put in ...)

[mlinksva]

Will have to move off gh-pages to implement redirects usefu to machine clients.

[Floppy]

Not necessarily: https://help.github.com/articles/redirects-on-github-pages/

[Floppy]

That may be irrelevant though, depending on how you're using gh-pages.

[mlinksva]

That just generates HTML with javascript redirects. You can see it in action at http://opendefinition.org/okd/

[Floppy]

yeah, sorry, I just read through properly and realised that myself. Ignore me :)

[mlinksva]

https://github.com/okfn/licenses/pull/69/files#diff-df8c50fbd9842b77c087e6defc698cfa has a proposed rename and adds a legacy_id field with the old name. How about that?

[rufuspollock]

@mlinksva i think that could work. @Stephen-Gates any thoughts at your end.

[Stephen-Gates]

@rufuspollock I've highlighted this thread to ODI Labs who I believe use the data.

[mlinksva]

It'd appear its consumed in https://github.com/theodi/odlifier/blob/60d8d808f3b283a7c58d8c727ef0705ae30962f9/lib/odlifier.rb which is used in 3 other ODI projects https://github.com/theodi/odlifier/network/dependents

Hopefully it'll be easy for them to become legacy_id aware in odlifier?

[Floppy]

I'm not there any more, but yes, one of us could easily update odlifier to use something like legacy_id.

[mlinksva]

@Floppy I made a crude attempt at theodi/odlifier#56 ... untested, I'm not good at Ruby and don't grok the VCR stuff in tests. 😬 🗑

Anyway, I'll merge #69 (changes id of a few licenses to SPDX assignment, adds legacy_id to those) when I hear from you that it's handled by ODI's tools, or in some months if nobody cares. 😄

[mlinksva]

Has been some months, assume nobody cares so merged #69 🎉