Bug#690665: lintian: ignore talk about licenses which are not used.

Bas Wijnen wijnen at debian.org
Tue Oct 16 08:43:11 UTC 2012


Package: lintian
Version: 2.5.10.2
Severity: wishlist

"love" gives some lintian warnings, because of the following paragraph
in its copyright file:

------------------------------------------------------------------
Comment:
    Warning: CPL is NOT compatible with GNU's General Public License,
    but that isn't be a problem in this case, because LÖVE doesn't use
    anything covered by that license.
    .
    List of libraries and tools used by LÖVE:
    * Lua (MIT)
    * OpenGL
    * SDL (LGPL)
    * SDL_mixer (LGPL)
    * FreeType 2 (FTL)
    * DevIL (LGPL)
    * PhysFS (ZLIB)
    * Box2D (ZLIB)
    * boost (BSL)
    * SWIG (BSD)
------------------------------------------------------------------

Lintian says: copyright-should-refer-to-common-license-file-for-lgpl
I could refer to it, which I think is not really useful in this case
(there's no reason to include (a link to) the license text in this
case), but even if I would, it wouldn't solve the problem: then it
complains that I shouldn't use an unversioned reference to it. It makes
even less sense to add a versioned reference.

Lintian should only emit this warning if the license is actually used by
the package, which means there must be a ^License: LGPL.*$ (and similar
for other shared-licenses) line, not just any occurrence of the license
name. This is true for DEP-5 files, anyway. If a non-DEP-5 file needs to
get this fixed, converting them to DEP-5 should be the answer. That only
works if lintian doesn't complain in cases like this one. :-)

So my suggestion is: make this test only trigger for License lines in
case of DEP-5 files, and add a notice about this in the explanation.

Thanks,
Bas
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