Bug#906284: Too many false positives?

[Jonathan Dowland <jmtd@debian.org>]

I think checking line length for the license text block would be much
more discriminative: approx 9% of the 317 currently matching packages
would trigger the test (some more than once). I attempted to simulate
this change in Lintian with a totally separate hacky script, manually
checking over the matches from *my* script produced the following bad
packages (including the 1/9 I found by-hand in my random-sampling)

   audacity
   bibletime
   gnome-devel-docs
   kbounce
   ksirk
   ktuberling
   marble
   mrpt
   ogre
   opensesame
   openscad-mcad (including: "it is licensed under the Creative Commons - GNU LGPL 2.1 license.")
   phabricator
   pioneers
   plm
   python-odf
   recommonmark
   starfighter ("CC-BY-SA-3.0+ Identical to CC-BY-SA-3.0, except you may also chose to use any later version of this license.")
   supercollider
   ublock-origin
   xia

My hacky script had 3-4 false positives too, but manual inspection of
them show that to be due to problems in my hacky script, and not in the
notion of line-length checking the license.

Special handling of CC0 is indeed necessary for the line length check.
I've seen it referred to as "CC-Zero" (haskell-network-multicast) as
well as the more common CC0.

So I support adjusting the regex to avoid CC0/Zero and doing a simpler
line length check, 20 seems reasonable.

What I haven't done is look at the other 297 packages currently matching
and determine whether they are also incorrect. But let's assume not.

--
Jonathan Dowland