Bug#797562: devscripts: licensecheck should skip only binary files (i.e. include e.g. Postscript)

[Jonas Smedegaard]

Hi Dominique,

[sent again - to proper bugreport this time]

Quoting Dominique Dumont (2015-08-31 14:12:58)
> On Fri, 31 Jul 2015 22:41:26 +0200 Jonas Smedegaard <dr at jones.dk> wrote:
> 
>> Converting most possible to utf-8 is a progression, but giving up on
>> other files is a regression: If a user asks to scan a (seemingly) binary
>> file then that is what the user wants to do.
[...]
> Unfortunately, your patch allows licensecheck to parse binary files 
> like jar

Yes, deliberately: My fix reverts to previous behaviour of actually 
scanning all files explicitly fed to examine - a behaviour other tools 
have come to rely on (specifically CDBS, which does its own cleanup of 
binary noise exactly because it is considered important to check _all_ 
files, not only those easy to glean info from).

I can see how some find it more useful to auto-skip files potentially 
produce noisy/unusable output.  That's a nice feature, but is 
_different_ and not always a win, so shold not be default behaviour IMO.


> I see 2 ways out of this:
> - go back to a while list and amend this white list to include the regressions 
> you've seen.
> - add an option to license-check to skip "maybe-binary" types
> 
> I think the first option would be better for our users.

I don't understand you proposals, but my stand is that changes in 
behaviour to skip files explicitly told to examine should be only 
optional, enabled by some commandline switch.


Hope that makes sense,

 - Jonas

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

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