Bug#832840: license-reconcile: FTBFS: dh_auto_test: perl Build test --verbose 1 returned exit code 255

[Jonas Smedegaard]

Quoting gregor herrmann (2016-08-01 20:51:56)
> On Fri, 29 Jul 2016 09:54:49 +0200, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
> 
> > Source: license-reconcile
> > Version: 0.11
> > Severity: serious
> > Tags: stretch sid
> > User: debian-qa at lists.debian.org
> > Usertags: qa-ftbfs-20160728 qa-ftbfs
> > Justification: FTBFS on amd64
> > 
> > Hi,
> > 
> > During a rebuild of all packages in sid, your package failed to build on
> > amd64.
> > 
> > > #   Failed test at t/09-nolicense.t line 13.
> > > # Compared $data->[0]{"copyright"}[0]
> > > #    got : 'Copyright: 1992-1993 The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.'
> > > # expect : 'Copyright: 1992, 1993 The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved'
> > > # Looks like you failed 1 test of 2.
> > > t/09-nolicense.t .......... 
> 
> 
> Smells like that's caused by changes in licensecheck which now uses
> String::Copyright which "serializes in normalized format".

That's what I smell too.


> In general I think that license-reconcile needs an active maintainer, 
> in cooperation with the moving underlying parts, or it needs to be 
> removed.  Doing emergency cleanups on each new failure is not 
> sustainable.

Agreed.


In my defense (I have taken over as upstream of licensecheck and am the 
author of String::Copyright), the "old" licensecheck had no guarantee 
about its output format and did not even document every change to it, 
which I believe has changed going forward.

Progress of licensecheck is intended to generally not break existing use 
(e.g. for its commandline options) but will not promise to guarantee 
identical output - especially not where change is considered an 
improvement like in this specific case of normalizing lists of years as 
the (in some cases only slightly) more compact ranges of years.

String::Copyright and/or licensecheck now by default normalizes to 
ranges when possible.  They might later grow an option to instead 
normalize to lists of years (i.e. expand to _avoid_ any year ranges, as 
I believe was an older GNU recomendation).

If someone feels the need also for a "leave as-is" option then please 
file a bugreport about that against either of those separate packages, 
but prepare to dig up some strong arguments, as I do not expect to 
easily be convinced that there is any benefit in that.


 - Jonas

-- 
 * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt
 * Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

 [x] quote me freely  [ ] ask before reusing  [ ] keep private
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 819 bytes
Desc: signature
URL: <http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-perl-maintainers/attachments/20160801/8d73c590/attachment.sig>