Dear Maintainer, I got the lintian error 'copyright-should-refer-to-common-license-file-for-lgpl' while building my debian package. I'm using the EUPL v1.2 which mentions, that it is LGPL compliant, but lintian doesn't seem to know about this license. It also seems like nobody else reported this issue before. Lintian told me to report it in this case, so here I am doing just that. Best regards Andreas Lindlbauer, B.Eng. Junior Researcher Center for Human-Computer Interaction University of Salzburg andreas.lindlbauer@sbg.ac.at https://hci.sbg.ac.at/lindlbauer/ *** Reporter, please consider answering these questions, where appropriate *** * What led up to the situation? * What exactly did you do (or not do) that was effective (or ineffective)? * What was the outcome of this action? * What outcome did you expect instead? *** End of the template - remove these template lines ***
Hi Andreas, According to my reading of the tag description [1] the issue is not that Lintian does not recognize the EUPL, but that it confuses that license with the LGPL, which is mentioned there. The tag is a request to refer to files installed under /usr/share/common-licenses instead of quoting the text in d/copyright. You are seeing a false positive. Before committing a fix, I would like to run Lintian on your package. Which one is it, please? Kind regards Felix Lechner [1] https://lintian.debian.org/tags/copyright-not-using-common-license-for-lgpl.html
Hey Felix, I figured, I was getting a false positive on the mention of LGPL *because* it doesn't know EUPLv1.2. It probably isn't the only one that mentions LGPL in its license text, right? So my thinking was that Lintian would have some sort of whitelist of mentions of LGPL. Sadly, I can't share the project I'm working on. It's in the process of being made FOSS, but it's still closed source at this point and not my call to share it. So, I guess I will just use an override for now. Maybe I can tip the scales in favor of LGPL until then, which would also fix it. 😅 Best regards Andreas Lindlbauer According to my reading of the tag description [1] the issue is not that Lintian does not recognize the EUPL, but that it confuses that license with the LGPL, which is mentioned there. The tag is a request to refer to files installed under /usr/share/common-licenses instead of quoting the text in d/copyright. You are seeing a false positive. Before committing a fix, I would like to run Lintian on your package. Which one is it, please? Kind regards Felix Lechner [1] https://lintian.debian.org/tags/copyright-not-using-common-license-for-lgpl.html
Hi Andreas, Could you get permission to share the d/copyright file? You could even anonymize the covered paths (the 'Files' sections), if needed. Kind regards Felix Lechner
Hi Felix, oh sure, I didn't even edit it, I just used the official one (I did a diff, just to be sure, and it really is the same file): <https://eupl.eu/1.2/en/>https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/sites/default/files/custom-page/attachment/2020-03/EUPL-1.2%20EN.txt Best regards Andreas Lindlbauer Could you get permission to share the d/copyright file? You could even anonymize the covered paths (the 'Files' sections), if needed. Kind regards Felix Lechner