System requirements for reuse (pipx)

[SvonGrebmer]

I wonder how necessary it is to introduce reuse at this point for something that (in my understanding) you can manually add? Else I think it is necessary to specify the exact requirements for using this they way you lay it out in the tutorial.

[fkohrt]

Yeah, the note on using REUSE is definitively rather advanced.

Just for clarification: Do you mean the whole note "Using REUSE to Record Licenses" on adding the license notices to files is unnecessary? Or only the introduction of the Python tool reuse within that note?

I think the capability to check whether the license of all files is indicated using...

reuse lint

...is helpful and on the page on archiving the project I mention the capability to create a summary of all the licenses used in the project by running:

reuse spdx -o reuse.spdx

However, I can also see how the tool might be too much for the simple projects that researchers work on. I have settled for the compromise of including it in a collapsed (and thus optional) note, but maybe it is still too comprehensive...

[fkohrt]

Concerning your point of documenting the requirements: I think we should note this optional requirement in the "home page" of the tutorial:

code-publishing/index.qmd

Lines 26 to 32 in 2f0747b

	In particular, we will assume you have installed
	[Git](https://git-scm.com/downloads),
	[R](https://cloud.r-project.org/),
	[RStudio](https://posit.co/download/rstudio-desktop/#:~:text=2%3A%20Install%20RStudio),
	and [Quarto](https://quarto.org/docs/download/).
	Windows users may additionally need
	[RTools](https://cloud.r-project.org/bin/windows/Rtools/).

I reckon the version of the Python tool reuse could also be documented as part of the tutorial by the readers, but I don't think it is very important. It is never run by anyone who receives the archived project in the end. And should anyone want to work with the provided reuse.spdx file, the version of reuse what was used for its creation is contained within that file.

A slightly related question is whether the environment of the code to create the machine-readable variable documentation should be written down somewhere. I'd say it doesn't hurt, but I also think it is not terribly important, because the code is never run by anyone who receives the resulting project in the end. (In fact, it might not even be included in the project, but only run once by the author.)

The tutorial could discuss these cases explicitly, however.