On Tue Jun 12 06:02:03 2012, RUFFIN, MICHEL (MICHEL) wrote:

We have an issue with 2 fields that do not exist in our database.: the
name of the archive file and the checksum. In the SPDX standard they
are mandatory and I do not see why would it be possibly to make them
optional?

I think making those fields optional would be advantageous. Would you mind filing a bug[1] so that we don't forget to look into the issue for the next version.

As for your immediate issues of not having data for those fields, if you are using RDF i'd just skip them altogether in the SPDX file. While your file will technically be invalid all reasonable SPDX consumers will not have a problem with that information being absent unless they need it to accomplish their goal. (In which case they cannot use your SPDX files, anyway.) If you are using the tag-value format skipping the fields altogether will, i think, prove problematic due to that format's stricter syntactic constraints. (Kate or Gary, can you confirm this?)

[1]: https://bugs.linuxfoundation.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=SPDX&component=Spec

Peter

PS: I am cc-ing the technical working group because it's participants are best suited to answer these sorts of issues.