Bug#948531: licensecheck incorrectly detects LGPL in a GPL COPYING license file

[Jonas Smedegaard]

control: tags -1 confirmed

[ sent again, without 8bit chars in To: header to please Debian MTAs ]

Hi Aurélien,

Quoting Aurélien COUDERC (2020-01-09 22:43:24)
> running licensecheck against this [1] upstream repo, the COPYING file 
> is incorrectly detected as LGPL whereas it’s actually GPL.

Correct.  Thanks for reporting it!

You are right that the cause is embedded references inside the license 
fulltext, and the proper solution is to map out the whole region covered 
by one license pattern and then omit scanning that region for other 
licensing patterns.  Implementing that mapping should also speed up the 
tool a bit.


 - Jonas

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

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Bug#948531: licensecheck incorrectly detects LGPL in a GPL COPYING license file

[Aurélien COUDERC]

Package: licensecheck
Version: 3.0.39-1
Severity: normal

Dear Maintainer,

running licensecheck against this [1] upstream repo, the COPYING file is
incorrectly detected as LGPL whereas it’s actually GPL.

$ licensecheck . | \grep "\./COPYING:"
./COPYING: GNU Lesser General Public License


I guess it is because the license preamble mentions:
(Some other Free Software Foundation software is covered by
the GNU Library General Public License instead.)


[1] git://anongit.kde.org/kcalc.git



Happy hacking !
--
Aurélien



-- System Information:
Debian Release: bullseye/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (990, 'unstable'), (500, 'unstable-debug'), (500, 'testing'), 
(150, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 5.4.0-1-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=fr_FR.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=fr_FR.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE= 
(charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled

Versions of packages licensecheck depends on:
ii  libgetopt-long-descriptive-perl0.104-1
ii  liblog-any-adapter-screen-perl 0.140-1
ii  liblog-any-perl1.707-1
ii  libmoo-perl2.003006-1
ii  libnamespace-clean-perl0.27-1
ii  libpath-iterator-rule-perl 1.014-1
ii  libpath-tiny-perl  0.108-1
ii  libpod-constants-perl  0.19-1
ii  libre-engine-re2-perl  0.13-4+b1
ii  libregexp-pattern-license-perl 3.1.99-1
ii  libregexp-pattern-perl 0.2.11-1
ii  libscalar-list-utils-perl  1:1.53-1
ii  libsort-key-perl   1.33-2+b2
ii  libstrictures-perl 2.06-1
ii  libstring-copyright-perl   0.003006-1
ii  libstring-escape-perl  2010.002-2
ii  libtry-tiny-perl   0.30-1
ii  perl   5.30.0-9
ii  perl-base [libscalar-list-utils-perl]  5.30.0-9

licensecheck recommends no packages.

Versions of packages licensecheck suggests:
ii  bash-completion  1:2.9-1

-- no debconf information