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#544 Provide SPDX identifiers in licensecheck.txt
Opened by gordonmessmer. Modified

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The licensecheck tool supports a "--shortname-scheme=spdx" argument. When this argument is used, licenses are identified by the SPDX expression.

Providing that expression in licensecheck.txt would be preferable, because it would allow maintainers to use the content of that file to fix their license expressions.

licensecheck follows the SPDX 2.0 identifier scheme, which uses DEP-5 compatible SPDX identifiers. This is not what we use in Fedora, so I'm not sure it's a good idea to mislead people into thinking the output matches what we want.

I'm not familiar with DEP-5.

I think it's described here: https://wiki.debian.org/Proposals/CopyrightFormat

When I compare the output of "licensecheck --shortname-scheme=spdx" to the section that describes the differences between DEP-5 and SPDX, the tool's output looks like the SPDX descriptions.

What should I know about the output of licensecheck?

It just adds a trailing .0 to the numeric versions from DEP-5, and the identifiers are still going to be things like GPL+/GPL-2.0+/etc. rather than the newer ones.
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