Bug#549596: lintian: Do not tag copyright-refers-to-symlink-license usr/share/common-licenses/GPL when debian/copyright contains "License: Artistic or GPL-1+"

[Salvatore Bonaccorso <salvatore.bonaccorso@gmail.com>]

Package: lintian
Version: 2.2.17
Severity: wishlist

Hi

Currently when debian/copyright contains

License: Artistic or GPL-1+

but not using License-Alias: Perl, and
the License-text only referencing to /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL
lintian will report pedantic 

copyright-refers-to-symlink-license usr/share/common-licenses/GPL

but not if "License-Alias: Perl" is present. License-Alias does not
appear anymore in the current DEP5 proposal [1]. 

 [1] http://dep.debian.net/deps/dep5/

In /usr/share/lintian/checks/copyright-file currently is as of version
2.2.17:

---(snip)---------------------------------------------------------------
# Allow generic GPL references for packages licensed under the same terms as
# Perl for now.  Perl references GPL version 1, which isn't in
# common-licenses.
#
# Avoid complaining about referring to a versionless license file if the word
# "version" appears nowhere in the copyright file.  This won't catch all of
# our false positives for GPL references that don't include a specific version
# number, but it will get the obvious ones.
if (m,(usr/share/common-licenses/(L?GPL|GFDL))([^-]),i && !m,as Perl itself,i
    && !m,License-Alias:\s+Perl,) {
    my ($ref, $license, $separator) = ($1, $2, $3);
    if ($separator =~ /[\d\w]/) {
        tag 'copyright-refers-to-nonexistent-license-file', "$ref$separator";
    } elsif (m,\b(?:any|or)\s+later(?:\s+version)?\b,i
             || m,License: $license-[\d\.]+\+,i) {
        tag "copyright-refers-to-symlink-license", $ref;
    } else {
        tag "copyright-refers-to-versionless-license-file", $ref
            if /\bversion\b/;
    }
}
------------------------------------------------------------------------

would it be possible here, that since License-Alias is not anymore in
DEP5, to include to not report copyright-refers-to-symlink-license
also if "License: Artistic or GPL-1+" is present?

Would it be possible to have somethin like (not tested yet!)
---(patch)--------------------------------------------------------------
--- lintian-2.2.17.orig/checks/copyright-file	2009-10-04 19:01:38.000000000 +0200
+++ lintian-2.2.17/checks/copyright-file	2009-10-04 19:04:43.000000000 +0200
@@ -161,7 +161,8 @@
 # our false positives for GPL references that don't include a specific version
 # number, but it will get the obvious ones.
 if (m,(usr/share/common-licenses/(L?GPL|GFDL))([^-]),i && !m,as Perl itself,i
-    && !m,License-Alias:\s+Perl,) {
+    && !m,License-Alias:\s+Perl, 
+    && !m,License:\s+Artistic\s+or\s+GPL-1\+,) {
     my ($ref, $license, $separator) = ($1, $2, $3);
     if ($separator =~ /[\d\w]/) {
 	tag 'copyright-refers-to-nonexistent-license-file', "$ref$separator";
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Bests
Salvatore

-- System Information:
Debian Release: squeeze/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: i386 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.30-1-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=de_CH.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash