Are there attributes for license and author tags in catkin? [closed]

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I would assume that the additional attributes should not be necessary. If licensing is split between parts of a package, these parts should be different packages. Otherwise depending on a package can become really hard if one needs to adhere to licensing. This might be useful for header files.

Sure, but I just wanted to include that it is possible to have a package that contains files that fall under different licenses. Whether that is something that is desirable is something else, but I can imagine situations where it is a necessity (including code that is under a different license fi)

So why is it possible to have multiple license tags then?

  <!-- One license tag required, multiple allowed, one license per tag -->
  <!-- Commonly used license strings: -->
  <!--   BSD, MIT, Boost Software License, GPLv2, GPLv3, LGPLv2.1, LGPLv3 -->
  <license>TODO</license>

So why is it possible to have multiple license tags then?

To allow for situations where that is required? I don't really understand your question.

It might not necessarily be something that in normal situations one would want to do, but it is supported because sometimes it is needed.

For the package, I need it for, it does not really make sense to me to create a library package out of that code, just because of the license, actually I will stay with the given license (GPLv3), but I was just curious. And I still would like to mention the author for the included stuff.

@gvdhoorn, I was replying to dornhege, who meant to split the package because of the license.

In most cases ROS pkgs do not include the sources of dependencies directly, but depend on libraries or other ROS pkgs. That would avoid the need for multiple licenses, and also for what you propose to do.

For your current situation, you could consider mentioning the author(s) in a readme fi.

For authors multiple author tags are commonly used. If you are just using a library, ideally you produce a ROS wrapper package that builds just that (with proper license, author, and maintainer set). This package is what your own code will use.