Add a submit via mail functionality to license submittal

[Ugtan]

I think it would be great to have a submit the license via mail button on the online tools when the license submittal feature doesn't work. I have noticed this a several number of times that if there is an error occurred during the submission of the license via the license submittal feature, the submitter gets an error message which asks them to contact the SPDX tech workgroup on the mail. So, they will have to submit the license via mail by entering the details again(also, the mail doesn't necessarily follows a template). Instead, as soon as the error is encountered the user should get a option to submit it via mail option which will automatically send a email to the legal team and also send the email to the tech team with the complete report of the error. Or maybe a button which says send report to tech team.

[Ugtan]

@goneall @rtgdk Let me know your thoughts on this issue.

[goneall]

@Ugtan In general, I like this idea. The only concern is having the email go to the entire tech team distribution list.

It would be better if any error would create an issue in the spdx-online-tools repo, then anyone watching the repo would get notified. We could also tag the issue.

[Ugtan]

It would be better if any error would create an issue in the spdx-online-tools repo, then anyone watching the repo would get notified. We could also tag the issue

It would be great. +1 on that idea.

[rtgdk]

@goneall @Ugtan Great idea! Having a tool that can raise an issue when the license submit feature/ license namespace submit feature fails in production is much needed. It will help us identify and fix issue quicker. Also, it will act as a way to add more tests to the functionality.We can also tell the user that the issue they encountered has been reported to the dev team - much easier than to the submitter to raise the issue.

Some ideas:

1. The issue raised should also include the server logs (without any leak for credentials or anything secret)
2. Attach a tag to the issue so these type of issue gets clubbed together
3. Maybe we can hide these type of issues raised to be viewed only by admin.

Some doubts:

1. Can we copy the form fields submitted by the user in the issue? This will not cause any legal concerns about copying user input to an open source issue where the whole world can see? Although, even our current online tool displays all the license submitted to all the users. Just confirming if this functionality causes any privacy issue. @goneall ?

[goneall]

Can we copy the form fields submitted by the user in the issue? This will not cause any legal concerns about copying user input to an open source issue where the whole world can see?

Since the user intends the data to be submitted to a public open source community, I don't think this would be an issue, but then I am not a lawyer (IANL).

@swinslow any concerns?

[swinslow]

I guess I have a few thoughts:

I'm not particularly concerned from the legal side, as @goneall said the point is to submit to a public open source community, whether via GitHub issue or via email.

That said, if there's an error, I'd be more inclined to do something like, tell the user to copy and paste the contents of their submission into a GitHub issue in the license-list-XML repo. My concern about just having it email the legal team list is that that then requires someone from the legal team to go and copy it into a GitHub issue.

Since I think we're requiring folks to have a GitHub account anyway to use the online submission tool, perhaps we can build out and over-explain the steps for someone to follow to file an issue, in case they are new to GitHub. Does that make sense?

[rtgdk]

@swinslow That makes sense. We are discussing a possibility to have a tool that will automatically raise the issue on author's behalf on our repo (not to the mailing list) along with their submission form and the error logs. This will help us -

1. Raise the license request even if online submission failed
2. Give the author a way to track their submission request ( from github issue)
3. Improve our tool functionality and testing with every new issue that gets raised.

Recently, we have seen frequent license request submission failing due to non-ascii characters and other uncommon failures. This will help us identify issues easily and help us with test data too.

@goneall @Ugtan Let me know if I am wrong/overthinking above.

[Ugtan]

@rtgdk Well put. This would help the developers/ maintainers of the repository to quickly track the issue and fix it asap. We can further use the data in our test cases to ensure such failures won't happen in the future as mentioned by @rtgdk.

[jlovejoy]

this is an old issue and I'm just catching up on things related to the license submission online tool!

I think there are two potential "reporting" items in play here:

1. that there has been an error and logging that in a way that people know about it
2. an alternative route for submitting the license if the online tool fails

I think focusing on 1 here would be a good thing.

2 is a sort of different issue (ha ha) because any issue that is generated needs to go to the license-list-XML repo, not here. That being said, I think there is some work on an issue template which could be used for submitting a license

[jlovejoy]

@goneall @rtgdk - is this still a live issue as relates to 1 above?

[goneall]

@jlovejoy Probably still a good idea for issue 1 above - logging and reporting. That being said, it is probably a lower priority relative to other issues.

We may want to rename this issue just to be number 1 - I personally think number 2 is more of a nice to have and probably won't be implemented any time soon.