licensecheck testing and bug triage

[Nicholas Bamber]

On 27/11/15 17:28, Dominique Dumont wrote:
> On Wednesday 25 November 2015 20:56:09 Nicholas Bamber wrote:
>> I have had a play with this, and I agree we can't do away with hand
>> crafted test files. However my proof of concept script generates quite a
>> few files that licensecheck cannot identify. I think licensecheck
>> keeping up with Software::License would be a good test of comprehesiveness.
>
> Agreed.
>
>> Also I looked through the bug reports that are in this area.
>>
>> I have offered a patch for #559429.
>
> Looks good to me. Feel free to commit this patch to devscripts repo.
>
>> I think we should merge #660451, #688088  and #688843 and retitle it
>> "generates false matches in BSD variant licenses". I reckon that needs
>> some work though it will be tricky.
>
> I'd rather not merge these bugs. There are indeed similar, but will require
> different tweaks in licensecheck (and different test cases)
>
>> I also marked #513967 wontfix based on my reading of the report.
>
> I was thinking that licensecheck could be modified to also check the last 60
> lines of a file (or more likely the last 5kbytes to be able to use seek) to
> catch the cases where license grant is placed at the end of the file (which
> happens quite often in Perl modules where the license is mentioned at the end
> of the pod doc)
>
> Thoughts ?
>


You have not said anything I cannot agree with. I'll check in the patch 
and the proof of concept script converted to a  test script (cut down to 
what works). The other tests can be made to work over time.

With regards to licensing and the end of Perl files I have seen this 
issue a lot and I had an idea as to how to handle it in 
license-reconcile. Use the Pod parsing tools to extract the section (or 
sections?) that is concerned with Copyright and License and run 
licensecheck on that. However if this is feasible it could be done in 
licensecheck itself. It would make licensecheck a LOT more complicated 
but clearly would solve the issue. On the other what you say would 
probably work well enough and would be more in keeping with the rest of 
licensecheck code.

Do you have any views on when 2.15.10 should be uploaded?