Cannot call (easily) the main scancode function from Python

[pombredanne]

Description

This has been discovered during a hacking session with @valeriocos . See also chaoss/grimoirelab-graal#64

Note that we also faced #1778 reported by @AyanSinhaMahapatra

System configuration

For bug reports, it really helps us to know:

• What OS are you running on? Linux
• What version of scancode-toolkit was used to generate the scan file? develop
• What installation method was used to install/run scancode? pip

[Iamshankhadeep]

@pombredanne Can I work on it?

[pombredanne]

@Iamshankhadeep this is a rather complex one: this about being able to call https://github.com/nexB/scancode-toolkit/blob/25d71f078f82d23a0b6ee0d0019e810430af4295/src/scancode/cli.py#L540 from another program for instance with run_scan(<absolute location of a file>, license=True, copyright=True, return_results=True) and get the results.

I know how to fix the problem ... but this requires introspection into how options are contributed by the all scancode plugins which is far from trivial. ... the **kwargs that are passed to scancode() by Click are not passed to run_scan() when you call it directly. This would likely mean digging in the innards of https://github.com/nexB/scancode-toolkit/blob/25d71f078f82d23a0b6ee0d0019e810430af4295/src/scancode/cli.py#L155 and/or may be more likely play with the values in https://github.com/nexB/scancode-toolkit/blob/25d71f078f82d23a0b6ee0d0019e810430af4295/src/scancode/cli.py#L222 to convert them to kwargs or may be use something like that https://github.com/nexB/scancode-toolkit/blob/25d71f078f82d23a0b6ee0d0019e810430af4295/src/scancode/cli.py#L233

You are welcome to have a stab at this... The first step would be to craft and commit a failing tests.

BUT I would suggest that you may look into something a tad easier like any of these two https://github.com/nexB/scancode-toolkit/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+label%3A%22good+first+issue%22+milestone%3A%22v3.1+%22

[pombredanne]

This has been fixed and merged in develop. I am keeping this open to add the docs for this.