Re: Bug#885698: What licenses should be included in /usr/share/common-licenses?
Jonas Smedegaard <jonas@jones.dk> writes:
> I have so far worked the most on identifying and grouping source data,
> putting only little attention (yet - but do dream big...) towards
> parsing and processing debian/copyright files e.g. to compare and assess
> how well aligned the file is with the content it is supposed to cover.
> So if I understand your question correctly and you are not looking for
> the output of `licensecheck --list-licenses`, then unfortunately I have
> nothing exciting to offer.
I think that's mostly correct. I was wondering what would happen if one
ran licensecheck debian/copyright, but unfortunately it doesn't look like
it does anything useful. I tried it on one of my packages (remctl) that
has a bunch of different licenses, and it just said:
debian/copyright: MIT License
and apparently ignored all of the other licenses present (FSFAP, FSFFULLR,
ISC, X11, GPL-2.0-or-later with Autoconf-exception-generic, and
GPL-3.0-or-later with Autoconf-exception-generic). It also doesn't notice
that some of the MIT licenses are variations that contain people's names.
(I still put all the Autoconf build machinery licenses in my
debian/copyright file because of the tooling I use to manage my copyright
file, which I also use upstream. I probably should change that, but I
need to either switch to licensecheck or rewrite my horrible script.)
Also, presumably it doesn't know about copyright-format since it wouldn't
be expecting that in source files, so it wouldn't know to include licenses
referenced in License stanzas without the license text included.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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