[Fedora-legal-list] License tag status - 2007/08/29

Tom "spot" Callaway tcallawa at redhat.com
Wed Aug 29 21:06:45 UTC 2007


On Wed, 2007-08-29 at 23:41 +0300, Ville Skyttä wrote:
> I mentioned to you in private mail that the "or" in "GPL+ or Artistic"
> will cause problems in rpmlint with its current implementation of the
> license tag check.  When "GPL+ or Artistic" used alone, it works
> because that string is in the license list as is and thus no splitting
> will occur.  But when combined with anything else (or even put in
> parenthesis), it no longer works as intended because the special case
> is no longer found as is, and thus will be split at "or" and the split
> parts are checked separately.

OK. Not sure how I missed this, but I've been wildly multi-tasking
lately.

The only way I think we can sanely handle this case is like this:

A. Does the License Tag string match an entry in the License list?
 [Yes] Stop, its fine.
 [No] Goto B.
B. Does the License Tag have any parenthesis in it?
 [Yes] Goto C.
 [No] Goto D.
C. Find parenthesis wrapped strings, make them into substrings. For each
substring, goto D.
D. Parse string through regex. Does each remaining item (things not
regexed to /dev/null) match an entry in the License list?
 [Yes] Do nothing, keep looking until we're out of strings. 
 [No] Print out the non-matching item. Keep looking until we're out of
strings.

Anyone want to take a crack at coding that in python? (Or propose a
better method?)

> By the way, "GPLv2+ or Artistic" is not in the license list in Wiki
> nor thus in rpmlint.

Ahh. I'll fix that right now.

~spot




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