Release Audit Tool
                            ==================

Apache RAT is an effort undergoing incubation at The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), 
sponsored by the Incubator PMC. Incubation is required of all newly accepted projects 
until a further review indicates that the infrastructure, communications, and decision 
making process have stabilized in a manner consistent with other successful ASF projects.
While incubation status is not necessarily a reflection of the completeness or stability 
of the code, it does indicate that the project has yet to be fully endorsed by the ASF.
      
Release Audit Tool (RAT) is a tool to improve accuracy and efficiency when checking
releases. It is heuristic in nature: making guesses about possible problems. It
will produce false positives and cannot find every possible issue with a release.
It's reports require interpretation.

RAT was developed in response to a need felt in the Apache Incubator to be able to
review releases for the most common faults less labour intensively. It is therefore
highly tuned to the Apache style of releases.

RAT is intended to be self documenting: reports should include introductory material
describing their function. Building RAT describes how to run RAT. Running RAT 
describes the options available. These release notes describe the current state of
RAT.

A good way to use RAT is to through the source. This allows the code base to be
easily patched for example to add new generated file matchers. The main jar is 
runnable and self-documenting. This jar is available as a standard alone binary.

RAT includes a task library for Ant 1.7. This allows RAT reports to be run against
a wide variety of resources. See ant-task-examples.xml. To use the Ant tasks, 
Apache Ant 1.7 is required. See http://ant.apache.org/.

For Maven builds, the plugin is recommended.

In response to demands from project quality tool developers, RAT is available as a 
library (rat-lib jar) suitable for inclusion in tools. Note that binary compatibility 
is not gauranteed between 0.x releases. The XML output format is not yet in it's 
final form and so library users are recommended to either use the supplied 
stylesheets or keep in close touch with the code.

RAT is in Incubation at Apache: http://incubator.apache.org/rat

Artifacts
=========
 TODO:

RAT 0.6
===========
 * Support for TMF header
 * Comprehend PEM, CRL file endings
 * Added reporting capability to recursive rat script
 * Moved to the Incubator@Apache
 * Issues Resolved (see http://issues.apache.org/jira):
  * Bug:
    * RAT-3 Incorrect alignment of file contents 
    * RAT-11 Incorrect number of unnapproved licences reported
    * RAT-12 Incorrect SCM info in maven plugin pom 
    * RAT-29 NPE on "mvn install" in rat-anttasks
    * RAT-33 Mailing list subscribe points to unsubscribe
    * RAT-34 No license header added for java files that do not contain project line
    * RAT-35 Incorrect number of unapproved licenses reported by rat:check
    * RAT-36 Report header incorrectly refers to an "L" license marker 
  * Improvement:
    * RAT-8 [PATCH] add JavaCC to GeneratedLicenseNotRequired 
    * RAT-9 A more informative website
    * RAT-10 A few Javadoc comments
    * RAT-23  More details in text summary
    * RAT-24 Include checksums on web page
    * RAT-26 Improve web summary
    * RAT-27 Index page
    * RAT-37 List all resources with unapproved licenses at the beginning of the report
  * New Feature
    * RAT-6 RAT Source Import    
  * Task
    * RAT-28 Repackage maven plugin          
  * Wish
    * RAT-1 maven-rat-plugin and ant-rat tasks

RAT 0.5.1
=========
 * Fixed file closing bug
 * Fixed XML bad character bug
 
RAT 0.5
=======
 * Added header matcher for DoJo.
 * Refactoring existing codebase to separate concerns and use 
   resource pipeline.
 * New header matching library.

RAT 0.4.1
=========
RAT 0.4.1 is the first release with distributions. The release was cut
for this purpose. 

RAT 0.4.1 Notes
===============
 * Created POM for use with RAT library.
 * Ant task switched to use Xml based report.

RAT 0.4 Notes
=============
 * Ant tasks added. These allow RAT reports to be run against a wide variety
   of resources from within Ant.
 * Legacy report is now deprecated. It will be removed before the next release.
 * Created stylesheet for xml reports which produce output similar to the legacy 
   plain text report. Application now uses the xml report with that stylesheet.
 * Revised xml output format
 * Improve support for binary recognition by adding code that tastes files

RAT 0.3 Notes
=============
 * This is the last release with the original hacked together plain test report. 
   The new XML reporting code is present but is not yet the default.
 * RAT 0.3 is the first release with release notes. All previous releases are
   now consigned to Ancient History. No record of them will be found here.