Bug#709365: lintian: check for standard license short names

[Jakub Wilk <jwilk@debian.org>]

* Niels Thykier <niels@thykier.net>, 2013-05-22, 22:08:
> > http://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/ 
> > defines a list of short names, but nothing warns people when they are 
> > not used.
> >
> > The attached patch could help with this problem.
>
> Hi,
>
> Thanks for the idea and the effort in making a patch of it.  However, I 
> believe that specification allows anyone to "invent" a new "ad-hoc" 
> license short name for any license without a standardised name:
>
> """
> First line: an abbreviated name for the license, or expression giving 
> alternatives (see the Short name section for a list of standard 
> abbreviations). If there are licenses present in the package without a 
> standard short name, an *arbitrary short name may be assigned* for 
> these licenses. These arbitrary names are only guaranteed to be unique 
> within a single copyright file.
> """
>
> (Emphasis mine)

Indeed, and more importantly:
"These short names have the specified meanings across all uses of this 
file format, and must not be used to refer to any other licenses."

So in some cases you _must_not_ use any of these standard names.

What Lintian could do is to parse the full license text, see if it 
matches any standard license, and if it does then emit the tag. But 
that's far from trivial to implement.

--
Jakub Wilk