Bug#903470: check Creative Commons license text is the real deal, not the human-readable short hand
Package: lintian
Severity: wishlist
Creative Commons licenses have short human-friendly summaries, such as this for
CC-BY 4.0:
You are free to:
Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format
Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose,
even commercially.
However, this is not the actual license text. On the relevant web page for this
particular license (<https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/>), it is prefigured
by "This is a human-readable summary of (and not a substitute for) the license" and
a longer disclaimer in a tool-tip.
The actual license text is <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode>
(links to plain texts are here <https://creativecommons.org/2014/01/07/plaintext-versions-of-creative-commons-4-0-licenses/>)
I stumbled across at least one package that has put the license summary text into
debian/copyright instead of the proper text (#903045). It occurred to me that a
lintian test could potentially catch this problem.
I'm not sure how prevalent this error is, which I suppose would be the next thing
to calculate. I personally would like to see the need for reproducing all of the CC
license text in copyright files removed, but that isn't looking too likely (see
#795402).
-- System Information:
Debian Release: 9.4
APT prefers stable
APT policy: (990, 'stable'), (600, 'unstable'), (500, 'oldstable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Kernel: Linux 4.15.12-x86_64-linode105 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
Versions of packages lintian depends on:
ii binutils 2.28-5
ii bzip2 1.0.6-8.1
ii diffstat 1.61-1+b1
ii dpkg 1.18.24
ii file 1:5.30-1+deb9u1
pn gettext <none>
pn intltool-debian <none>
pn libapt-pkg-perl <none>
pn libarchive-zip-perl <none>
pn libclass-accessor-perl <none>
pn libclone-perl <none>
ii libdpkg-perl 1.18.24
pn libemail-valid-perl <none>
pn libfile-basedir-perl <none>
pn libipc-run-perl <none>
ii liblist-moreutils-perl 0.416-1+b1
pn libparse-debianchangelog-perl <none>
ii libperl5.24 [libdigest-sha-perl] 5.24.1-3+deb9u4
pn libtext-levenshtein-perl <none>
ii libtimedate-perl 2.3000-2
ii liburi-perl 1.71-1
ii libxml-simple-perl 2.22-1
ii libyaml-libyaml-perl 0.63-2
ii man-db 2.7.6.1-2
pn patchutils <none>
ii perl 5.24.1-3+deb9u4
pn t1utils <none>
ii xz-utils 5.2.2-1.2+b1
Versions of packages lintian recommends:
ii dpkg 1.18.24
pn libperlio-gzip-perl <none>
ii perl 5.24.1-3+deb9u4
ii perl-modules-5.24 [libautodie-perl] 5.24.1-3+deb9u4
Versions of packages lintian suggests:
pn binutils-multiarch <none>
ii dpkg-dev 1.18.24
ii libhtml-parser-perl 3.72-3
pn libtext-template-perl <none>
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