Bug#762154: lintian: ignore header's license field for missing-license-paragraph-in-dep5-copyright ?

[Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org>]

Package: lintian
Version: 2.5.27
Severity: wishlist

Dear Lintian maintainers,

I have a package where the machine-readable copyright file has the
following licence field in its header.

    License: GPL-2 and MIT and GPL-3+ with runtime exception and zlib
     BEDTools combines source code under GPL-2, LGPL-2.1 and MIT licenses, and
     links to libc6, libgcc, libstdc++ and zlib1g.

It triggers the following warnings

    W: bedtools source: missing-license-paragraph-in-dep5-copyright zlib (paragraph at line 7)
    W: bedtools source: missing-license-paragraph-in-dep5-copyright gpl-3+ with runtime exception (paragraph at line 7)
    W: bedtools source: missing-license-paragraph-in-dep5-copyright mit (paragraph at line 7)

I wonder if it wouldn't be better to ignore the license field of the
header for that check.

The alternative would be to add standalone paragraphs for these
licenses, but this would be a lot of “boilerplate” text in the
copyright files…

Have a nice day,

-- 
Charles Plessy
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan