Consider supporting British spellng of "license". [rt.cpan.org #83506]

[dagolden]

https://rt.cpan.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=83506

I've come across some METAs that use the British spelling of "license"
as "licence".  These will fail the CPAN::Meta conversion process.   I
realize this is a slippery slope, but do you think it would make sense
to support the alternate spelling?

[patch]

I'm sympathetic to the issue and, yes, it is a slippery slope. First we should ask, what languages does the spec support? Even if it isn't stated explicitly, it clearly supports English (en), but that's pretty broad. Right now it's implemented to support American English (en-US) and possibly other English dialects but not British English (en-GB) and many other English dialects. If we support both, are we officially supporting both en-US and en-GB, or do we broadly support any possible dialect of en. Before making a seemingly simple change like supporting both license and licence, we should define what specific languages are supported.

[dolmen]

"licence" is also the french spelling which may explain some cases too.

[book]

At least it was spelt right in some language in the spec from the beginning... Unlike Referer in the HTTP RFC. :-)

More seriously, supporting both LICENSE and LICENCE spellings makes sense for tools meant to read documents written by humans (like CPANTS scoring the docs of a distribution). My understanding was that the META files were (in their overwhelming majority) generated documents, and so the spelling shouldn't matter.

My conclusion is that, because the META files are documents written by machines and read by machines, there should actually be a _single_ spelling to reduce ambiguity and complexity (and avoid dealing with issues like "what to do when a document contains both license and licence?").

[dagolden]

I'm with @book. We should have a single spelling.

But I would welcome a patch for CPAN::Meta::Converter that translated licence to license to help improve consistency and reduce errors.