Bug#906284: lintian: check for incomplete-creative-commons-license gives false positives: the "not a law firm" is a preamble, not a license

[Julian Gilbey <jdg@debian.org>]

On Thu, Aug 16, 2018 at 04:32:08PM +0100, Chris Lamb wrote:
> Hi Julian,
> 
> > The test for the human-readable rather than legal text of the Creative
> > Commons licenses seems to fail, because the preamble about Creative
> > Commons not being a law firm is not part of the license text, and
> > neither is the postamble about Creative Commons not being a party to
> > the license agreement; they are instead form the terms and conditions
> > between Creative Commons and the person using a CC license.  So I
> > cannot see why these parts should necessarily be included in the
> > Debian copyright file.  Has there been a policy decision to require
> > this, perhaps?
> > 
> > Also, it seems that this check would be better in the parse_license
> > function when checking each license block rather than the run
> > function, as there might be more than one CC license in a copyright
> > file, and it is feasible that one is correct and one not.
> 
> CC'ing Jonathan Dowland who filed the original request for this
> in #903470. Could you folks come to some agreement on a good/reliable
> check?

Hi Chris and Jonathan,

How about the following?  In the parse_license function, where each
license paragraph is parsed, something like the following:

if ($full_license and $short_license =~ m/cc-/) {
    if ($full_license !~ /definitions/i) {
        tag 'incomplete-creative-commons-license';
    }
}

All of the full legal texts contain "Section 1. Definitions", whereas
the human-readable summaries don't.

This also means that you are not searching the entire copyright file,
but rather just the paragraph with the full Creative Commons text.

Best wishes,

   Julian