Deterministic Order in Notices Generator

[radeusgd]

Summary

The legal review tool generates notices summarizing all copyright mentions from our dependencies.

Currently, the order in which these mentions end up in the summary is unspecified and it seems to differ depending on some unknown variables.

This task would consist of ensuring that the order is actually deterministic.

The fact that the order varies is not at all a problem from the perspective of validity of the report - it just must contain all the mentions. However, as the order sometimes changes after running the legal review tool, it pollutes PRs with meaningles changes (reordering of the entries in the summary).

Value

• The deterministic order will mean PRs will not be polluted with meaningles changes to the legal review report.

Specification

• Ensure that the order of copyright mentions in the report is deterministic. Probably can be achieved just by sorting the mentions lexicographically.

Acceptance Criteria & Test Cases

• Regenerate and commit the 'determinized' legal review report.
• Make sure that the change did not introduce errors into the report generator.