#1135671 incorrectly guesses GPL-2 despite SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0-or-later

Package:
licensecheck
Source:
licensecheck
Submitter:
Martin-Éric Racine
Date:
2026-06-10 08:55:01 UTC
Severity:
normal
#1135671#5
Date:
2026-05-04 06:46:43 UTC
From:
To:
When run against the Forky version of upgrade-system, licenserecon incorrectly finds a license mismatch on only one of 4 files with the exact same SPDX-License-Identifier. Additionally, licensecheck declares GPL-2 on all 4, instead of the expected GPL-2+.

$ licenserecon .
Ignoring unknown option .
fi: Versions: licenserecon '15.0'  licensecheck '3.3.9-1'

Parsing Source Tree  ....
Reading d/copyright  ....
Running licensecheck ....

d/copyright      | licensecheck

GPL-2+           | GPL-2             upgrade-system.conf.5

$ licensecheck .
./upgrade-system: GNU General Public License, Version 2
./upgrade-system.8: GNU General Public License, Version 2
./upgrade-system.conf: GNU General Public License, Version 2
./upgrade-system.conf.5: GNU General Public License, Version 2

$ grep GPL *
grep: debian: Is a directory
upgrade-system:# SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0-or-later
upgrade-system.8:SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0-or-later
upgrade-system.conf:# SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0-or-later
upgrade-system.conf.5:SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0-or-later

Feel free to reassign or clone to licensecheck as needed.

Martin-Éric
#1135671#18
Date:
2026-05-06 09:42:50 UTC
From:
To:
This was cloned from licenserecon since the bug is two-fold. See above
for the explanation.

Cheers!
Martin-Éric
#1135671#25
Date:
2026-06-10 08:45:50 UTC
From:
To:
My research into this bug suggests that it's caused by results produce by
libstring-license-perl (see: #1139580).

Cheers, Phil.