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  2. End Of Life Tag in spdx

Re: End Of Life Tag in spdx #spdx

Armijn Hemel - Tjaldur Software Governance Solutions
 

hello,

I would suggest to keep this information "out of band" and not inside SPDX documents. Current information inside SPDX documents is largely static: package, license, checksum, and so on. Of course there could have been errors that need to be fixed, but overall these fields are static.

EOL information, commercial status and support status on the other hand are much more dynamic. Sometimes packages are supported for only a few hours, sometimes for decades. Very often it is also not clear when a package is EOL or supported as many authors/maintainers do not announce it. The support is sometimes also not done by the author/maintainers, but by an external entity (for example: enterprise grade Linux distributions). Does this mean it is supported, or only supported for people willing to pay for it, or .... ? It is simply not clear and it adds a lot of fuzziness.

This would make SPDX a lot more cumbersome, as not only do the documents need to be generated, but they also need to be updated all the time to avoid falling out of sync. It also mixes syntax and semantics, which is never a good idea.

armijn

Kate and Sandeep,

 

Our customers are also interested in this information. There are two concepts to consider:

Commercial Status:

        <enumeration value="Available"></enumeration>

        <enumeration value="Retired"></enumeration>

        <enumeration value="EOL"></enumeration>

        <enumeration value="BetaTest"></enumeration>

        <enumeration value="Pilot"></enumeration>

        <enumeration value="Abandoned"></enumeration>

 

Support Status:

        <enumeration value="Supported"></enumeration>
        <enumeration value="Unsupported"></enumeration>
        <enumeration value="Community"></enumeration>

 

Both are described in the open-source Vendor Response File (VRF) XML schema available here: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rjb4standards/REA-Products/master/SAGVendorSchema.xsd

 

 

Thanks,

 

Dick Brooks

 

Active Member of the CISA Critical Manufacturing Sector,

Sector Coordinating Council – A Public-Private Partnership

 

Never trust software, always verify and report! ™

http://www.reliableenergyanalytics.com

Email: dick@...

Tel: +1 978-696-1788

 

From: spdx@... <spdx@...> On Behalf Of Kate Stewart
Sent: Friday, May 6, 2022 3:34 PM
To: SPDX-general <spdx@...>
Subject: Re: [spdx] End Of Life Tag in spdx #spdx

 

Hi Sandeep,

 

     There is a pull request expected shortly from the Usage profile team, to add this specific field to 2.3.

When it comes in,  please feel free to review and make sure it's going to suffice for your needs.

 

For now, with 2.2 documents,  suggest you use the Package Comment field (https://spdx.github.io/spdx-spec/package-information/#720-package-comment-field) and standardize on a tag (like EndOfSupport: ) and the date. 

 

Will that work for now?

 

Thanks, 
Kate

 

On Fri, May 6, 2022 at 2:27 PM Patil, Sandeep via lists.spdx.org <sandeep.patil=philips.com@...> wrote:

Hi All, 
We have requirement to specify End Of Life as part of package information in SBoM ,
Is there way current SPDX format support this ? 

Regards
Sandeep  


-- 
Armijn Hemel, MSc
Tjaldur Software Governance Solutions
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