Bug#497346: lintian should warn about references to symlinked common-licenses files
Raphael Geissert <atomo64@gmail.com> writes:
> On Sunday 31 August 2008 23:20:32 Russ Allbery wrote:
>> Raphael Geissert <atomo64@gmail.com> writes:
>>> The following snippet is pretty common and always, IMHO, wrong:
>>>> On Debian systems, the complete text of the GNU General
>>>> Public License can be found in `/usr/share/common-licenses/GPL'.
>>> It should either refer to GPL-2 or GPL-3. The same applies to GFDL and
>>> LGPL.
>> I made that argument and lots of people disagreed with me. I don't
>> think this is something we can impose with Lintian until you can build
>> consensus within the project; many people believe this reference to be
>> just fine for a package that's covered under "or any later version"
>> terms.
> So, what's the way to go here?
> severity:minor when no "or any later version" is used? and
> severity:pedantic when it is?
> Or just the former with the severity of the latter?
> Note: currently the unversioned file names point to the latest version
> of the licence.
I'd say severity: normal, certainty: either possible or wild-guess if we
can match on the "or any later version" phrase in the copyright file,
depending on how well we do the matching. If "or any later version" is
present, I think we should still warn with severity: pedantic, since I
think the user should still be pointing to the version of the GPL stated
in the license, not some random later version.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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