Bug#704306: libconfig-model-dpkg-perl: does not catch invalid license text

[Felix Natter]

Dominique Dumont <dod at debian.org> writes:

hi Dominique,

> On Sunday 31 March 2013 16:18:53 Felix Natter wrote:
>> For instance, this is accepted:
>> 
>> Files: *
>> Copyright: 2006-2013 Foo Bar <foo at bar.com>
>> License: GPL-2+
>>     bla
>> 
>> but "bla" is not a correct license 
>
> Knowing that any software author can write its own license, what algorithm do 
> you propose to check the "correctness" of a license ? 

I was thinking about the indentation mostly, but as you stated below I am
wrong on this.

What about catching single-line licenses? Or is 

License: GPL
 see /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL

valid? Are there single-line license texts?

Other than that, I also cannot think of more stuff to check.

> For well known licenses like GPL-*, dpkg model could check if the license text 
> matches the one proposed by default. But I don't like this idea, because the 
> text can change over time without rendering old text wrong. So we could get a 
> lot of false positive for no added value. 

That would definitely not be useful ;-)

>> and it's not indented correctly.
>
> AFAIK, this indentation does respect the Description format documented there:
> http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-controlfields#s-f-Description

I didn't realize that, thanks for the clarification.

Best Regards,
-- 
Felix Natter