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Override unwanted settings inherited from spring-boot-starter-parent in Maven projects

See original GitHub issue

Maven-based projects that use spring-boot-starter-parent inherit the <licenses> and <developers> from the parent. We should override these in the pom.xml of generated Maven projects. The following appears to be the minimum effective override:

<developers>
    <developer />
</developers>
<licences>
    <license />
</licences>

Issue Analytics

State:
Created 4 years ago
Comments:7 (7 by maintainers)

Top GitHub Comments

1reaction

wilkinsonacommented, Jun 7, 2021

#1242 and the discussion on Twitter has given me cause to think about this some more. The key argument that led to us declining this, IIRC, was the following:

There are a number of reports that user switch the parent to one of their own. If we added those overrides, they would know have to switch the parent and potentially removes those override as the value in their parent is what they want

Not having to do too much when you switch to a custom parent is undoubtedly a good thing and this is a point in favour of not having the overrides. However, it comes at a cost and I now think that cost is rather high.

If we generated the overrides and a project switched to a custom parent while leaving the overrides in place, it would have no license declared. IANAL, but my understanding is that a lack of license doesn’t really indicate anything. You can’t, for example, slap a license of your choosing on someone else’s code just because it doesn’t have a license. On the other hand, not generating the excludes leaves generated projects inheriting Spring Boot’s Apache v2 license which has a high change of being the wrong license. Whether or not that inherited license has any legal weight is an unknown, but it feels to me that no license is much better than a potentially incorrect license. The same goes for the other settings that we’d have to override. They all feel to me like it’s better for them to be absent than incorrect.

0reactions

snicollcommented, Nov 27, 2019

We’ve discussed this one and we’ve agreed not to apply those for projects generated by initializr with our conventions. There is some information in the ref guide about it, I’ve opened https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-boot/issues/19165 to make sure that part is properly described as we already have a link in HELP.md to that.