Lintian ReportsBETA

copyright-refers-to-symlink-license

The copyright file refers to the versionless symlink in /usr/share/common-licenses for the full text of the GPL, LGPL, or GFDL license. This symlink is updated to point to the latest version of the license when a new one is released. The package appears to allow relicensing under later versions of its license, so this is legally consistent, but it implies that Debian will relicense the package under later versions of those licenses as they're released. It is normally better to point to the version of the license the package references in its license statement.

For example, if the package says something like "you may redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option) any later version", the debian/copyright file should refer to /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-2, not /GPL.

For packages released under the same terms as Perl, Perl references the GPL version 1, so point to /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-1.

The tag is present in Lintian version 2.114.163. That is the most recent version we know about.

We use semantic versions. The patch number is a commit step indicator relative to the 2.114.0 release tag in our Git repository.

You can find the detection logic for this version at commit ea05801. For merge requests, please use the latest version in the Lintian check debian/copyright.

Visibility: pedantic

The following 1059 source packages in the archive triggered the tag 2605 times (in any Lintian version).

We found 7 overrides. The tag performed 100% of the time.