Clarify license and make module top comments more consistent #1730

This improves the consistency of top-of-module comments as follows: - All names of the current file are removed. Some included these while others didn't. In general, this can be useful information, which can remind readers and developers of what the file is and may even reduce mistakes. However, in GitPython, many modules inside git/ have the same name as other modules in other subdirectories of git/. So the presence of filenames would often be the same for multiple files, a condition that would be intensified if consistency were achieved by adding them everywhere. This instead removes them, which should (albeit slightly) decrease the risk of confusing modules that have the same name as each other. - All modules (.py files) inside git/ and test/, except for .py files that are entirely empty (without even comments) or are inside test/fixtures/, now have comments indicating the license and linking to it on opensource.org. Previously, some modules had this, while others did not. The comment about the license is short, and does not contain an explicit copyright statement. No new explicit copyright statements are added, but some top-of-modules already contained them, and this does not remove (nor update or otherwise modify) them. Although explicit copyright statements are not touched, all the license comments are modified, including where they had previously appeared, to say "the 3-Clause BSD License" instead of "the BSD License", since there is no specific license known as the "BSD License" (and both the 2-clause and 3-clause BSD licenses are very popular). This change should not be confused with gitpython-developers#1662, which fixed an originally correct hyperlink that had come to redirect to a page about a different license. The change here does not change the link again. It makes the commented wording more specific, so that it is clear, even without looking at the link, which BSD license is being referred to.

The license in README.md was named as "New BSD License", which is in practice unambiguous, but no longer as readily recognized as is "3-Clause BSD License". This updates the wording to call it by the latter name, for that reason and for consistency with the previous commit's changes to top-of-module comments, while also noting parenthetically that it is also called the New BSD License. The main reason for retaining "New BSD License" parenthetically is to prevent anyone from being confused into thinking this change is in any way associated with a change to the license, or that any license change has occurred or is forthcoming. (This does *not* change how GitPython is actually licensed in any way.)

This uses "BSD-3-Clause" instead of "BSD" as the "license" metadata in setup.py. "BSD-3-Clause" is the SPDX license identifier for the BSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" License (the license GitPython uses): https://spdx.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause.html There is no requirement to use an SPDX license identifier here, but it is one of the common approaches, and it has the advantage of making unambiguously clear, when a package is published on PyPI, exactly what license it uses. In contrast, the license-related *classifier* is unchanged, since no more specific classfifier than what is in use now is currently available. The combination should result in License: BSD License (BSD-3-Clause) being shown under "Meta" on PyPI, as of the next PyPI release. This can be seen in other projects that use this combination of license keyword argument and license-related classifier, such as: https://pypi.org/project/flask-restx/

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Clarify license and make module top comments more consistent #1730

Clarify license and make module top comments more consistent #1730

Commits on Nov 3, 2023