FYI: license-check -reconsile ...

[Osamu Aoki]

Hi,

I guess I should discuss this in public.  Let me update original
mail a bit.

I saw an interesting discussion for bug=801690 or bug=801609 ;-)

Anyway, aside from some troubles facing license-reconcile, here is my
thought on approaches licensecheck has:

 * licensecheck uses partial string match
 * binary file license is interesting topic but it should be better if
   it is a separate tool

As for the first one, I understand this is one valid approach with some
benefits.  I personally wanted to have license text extractor tool with
the full text match. I made a different tool: debmake (*).  By making
debmake, I realized and faced the similar problem.  There are some binary
files and there are some XML files which does not behave well with
simple text scanner like licensecheck or "debmake -cc".

In my tool, I just categorize files into 3 groups: Code, XML, Binary.  I
only scan license for Code.  I originally used licensecheck from
devscripts but eventually replaced it with my python version of license
check code with full text match.  (This is not the point I want to
discuss now.)

If there is a binary file license check tool, that can be used by
debmake too.  At least, if there is a way to call its binary file
scanner from other tool, it will be nice.  I have not looked at
licensecheck in detail, but "embedded ICC profiles" is one concern which
licensecheck like program should find out.

Also, removing "copyrighted embedded ICC profiles in images" falls into
mk-origtargz/uscan functionality.  I have made update in perl for
mk-origtargz/uscan but I have not addressed ICC thing yet.
If there is a established way to scan binary file, I can use it too.
  https://bugs.debian.org/748474
  https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2014/05/msg00312.html

Osamu

(*): I know I should have wrote debmake in perl so the code can be
compatible with licensecheck.  But I am not good at perl.  debmake has
somewhat overlapped functionality as licensecheck but its focus is more
on creating and updating packaging template files.

 "debmake" to make all the template files (generate debian/copyright)
 "debmake -cc" to get the template  debian/copyright file ( to STDOUT)
 "debmake -k" to check the debian/copyright file with the current source.

At least, this script gives me a easy time to package autotools based
packages.  The use of this debmake command helped me to find some
licenses not listed in the previously packaged packages.

Osamu