Your message dated Sun, 15 Feb 2026 21:12:05 +0100
with message-id <[email protected]>
and subject line Re: Bug#1102363: Maybe "reuse spdx"
has caused the Debian Bug report #1102363,
regarding licensecheck: source formats: support excluding formats e.g. to only
check for SPDX fields
to be marked as done.
This means that you claim that the problem has been dealt with.
If this is not the case it is now your responsibility to reopen the
Bug report if necessary, and/or fix the problem forthwith.
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--
1102363: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1102363
Debian Bug Tracking System
Contact [email protected] with problems
--- Begin Message ---
Package: licensecheck
Severity: wishlist
Hello,
if covering/parsing SPDX meta data is implemented (#960665) please make sure to
ignore all other licenses strings.
Let me provide you some real world problem where this would be important and
also save resources of Debian package maintainers.
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=960665
The "problem" here is that the whole project does offer SPDX meta data and
"reuse lint" is green on all files, which means the project is SPDX conform.
But one file "serviceHelper.py" does have comments about the license
history of that file. Some other licenses are named just of historical
reasons. License checker does consider that strings, too. That is the problem.
This is a follow-up from: <https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-
bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=960665#36>
Regards,
Christian Buhtz
-- System Information:
Debian Release: trixie/sid
APT prefers testing
APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: arm64 (aarch64)
Kernel: Linux 6.12.20-arm64 (SMP w/4 CPU threads)
Kernel taint flags: TAINT_CRAP
Locale: LANG=de_DE.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=de_DE.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE not set
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled
Versions of packages licensecheck depends on:
pn libfeature-compat-class-perl <none>
pn libfeature-compat-try-perl <none>
pn libio-interactive-perl <none>
pn liblog-any-adapter-screen-perl <none>
pn liblog-any-perl <none>
pn libnamespace-clean-perl <none>
pn libpath-iterator-rule-perl <none>
pn libpath-tiny-perl <none>
pn libpod-constants-perl <none>
pn libstring-copyright-perl <none>
pn libstring-escape-perl <none>
pn libstring-license-perl <none>
ii perl 5.40.1-2
Versions of packages licensecheck recommends:
pn libregexp-pattern-license-perl <none>
Versions of packages licensecheck suggests:
pn bash-completion <none>
--- End Message ---
--- Begin Message ---
Quoting [email protected] (2026-02-15 15:32:55)
> I realized that this is a perl thing. Sorry, this is over my
> horizon. I am not able to contribute code to this.
Fair enough.
> But I also thought it might be worse to modify the existing tools.
>
> I context of SPDX there still is "reuse" as a tool offering the "spdx"
> command. The command "reuse spdx" gives clear information about all
> machine readable SPDX meta data in a repo. And "reuse lint" gives clear
> information if all files are covered by SPDX.
>
> So there still is a tool to read SPDX data. Why not integrate that
> somehow in the Debian toolchain for projects offering
> 100%-SPDX-covarage?
>
> Wouldn't it ease the burden for maintainers at Debian and upstream?
My impression when you initially opened this bugreport was that you had
some use case where you needed licensecheck to strictly produce SPDX.
Now it seems that you yourself do not have a need for here, but that
you speculate that Debian might have a need for soem pure-SPDX tooling.
Personally I don't think that Debian developers has any problem
identifying which tools they are in need of, but if you think that you
can contribute ideas then feel free to reach out to us all at the email
address [email protected] (or some other more narrowly
scoped mailinglist as appropriate).
If you think that users would have benefit in Debian shipping the reuse
tool, then feel free to propose that by filing a so-called RFP
bugreport about that - see https://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/#l1
I will now close this bugreport, since there is apparently nothing
actionable here. Please do clarify if you think I am mistaken and there
is something more to do here, with licensecheck, specifically.
Kind regards,
- Jonas
--
* Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt
* Tlf.: +45 40843136 Website: http://dr.jones.dk/
* Sponsorship: https://ko-fi.com/drjones
[x] quote me freely [ ] ask before reusing [ ] keep private
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