Dear Lintian Maintainers,

As of 29 May 2026 [1] the following licenses are included in base-files:
AGPL-3.0, Artistic-2.0, BSL-1.0, CC-BY-3.0, CC-BY-4.0, CC-BY-SA-3.0,
CC-BY-SA-4.0, GFDL-1.1 and OFL-1.1.

However, lintian 2.136.2 still emits e.g. W:
incomplete-creative-commons-license cc-by-4.0 when referring to the text
in /usr/share/common-licenses instead of appending the whole license
text to d/copyright.

I wonder if it would make sense for there to be some mechanism for the
lintian team to be CC on proposals like this, maybe a BTS tag, so it
doesn't fall to individual contributors to notice?

In any case, thanks for your work,

sney

[1] https://bugs.debian.org/1136090

Looks like many new licenses have been added. For other licenses that were
already present in base files, lintian issues tags like

copyright-not-using-common-license-for-apache2
copyright-file-contains-full-apache-2-license

I think it would make sense to completely get rid of the "incomplete-creative-commons-license"
tag and just add in these tags for all the new ones.

Doing that and adding tests for all of this is a bit of work, and would take a bit of time. Patches
welcome, ofcourse.

For now, I've opened an MR (and planning to merge it) for this (incomplete-creative-commons-license)
tag to not be triggered if "usr/share/common-licenses/CC-*" is mentioned (the check is for cc-*).

Someone should add an affects on lintian or x-debbugs-cc this list https://lists.debian.org/debian-lint-maint/

Best,
Nilesh