#1008292 lintian: inconsistent-appstream-metadata-license seems to be a bad rule

Package:
lintian
Source:
lintian
Submitter:
Joao Eriberto Mota Filho
Date:
2022-03-26 02:12:03 UTC
Severity:
normal
#1008292#5
Date:
2022-03-26 01:13:08 UTC
From:
To:
Dear maintainer,

When reviewing the package achilles, I added an AppStream metafile with the MIT
licensing. The lintian said me:

  achilles source: inconsistent-appstream-metadata-license debian/upstream/net.sourceforge.achilles.achilles.metainfo.xml (mit != gpl-2+) [debian/copyright]

So I changed the licensing of the AppStream metafile to GPL-2+. After this, the
tracker.debian.org showed an error 'metainfo-license-invalid' and asked for use
a valid permissive license like FSFAP, CC0-1.0 or MIT. The same message pointed
a link to understand the problem:

https://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/chap-Metadata.html#tag-metadata_license

Part of the text in above weblink says:

  The <metadata_license/> tag indicates the content license that you are
  releasing the one metainfo XML file under. This is typically not the same as
  the project license. Omitting the license value will result in the metainfo
  data not being incorporated into metadata collections as used by Linux
  distributions. This tag is required for all metainfo files. [...]  Currently,
  the following licenses have been reviewed and can be used as metadata
  licenses: FSFAP, MIT, 0BSD, CC0-1.0, CC-BY-3.0, CC-BY-4.0, CC-BY-SA-3.0,
  CC-BY-SA-4.0, GFDL-1.1, GFDL-1.2, GFDL-1.3, BSL-1.0, FTL, FSFUL.

Consequently, IMO, this lintian rule is inconsistent and should be dropped.

Regards,

Eriberto

#1008292#10
Date:
2022-03-26 02:09:17 UTC
From:
To:
After adding a new stanza in debian/copyright to describe the
metafile, the lintian was solved. I was confused because of the '(mit
!= gpl-2+)' sentence. Maybe it could be changed to avoid
misinterpretations.

Sorry for my mistake and feel free to close this bug if you think that
the lintian message is right.

Regards,

Eriberto