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Handling of license files outside of the LICENSE folder

Open cordlandwehr opened this issue 5 months ago • 5 comments

In the Yocto packaging world there I have the following use case:

  • I have a Yocto meta-layer that is in an abstract view a git repository with build description files
  • Yocto layers can provide license text files, which in later build steps need to be included in builds of the respective software packages
  • for Yocto purposes, those files have no ".txt" extension and are located in some other folder than LICENSES/ for technical reasons that are not fast/simple to change
  • most of those license file do not provide license texts for files inside the repository but for files in external repositories

All this makes reuse lint fail for me unless I assign a license to the license text file. By the same arguments why all files in LICENSES/ are also not included in the linter, I propose to add an option to e.g. the REUSE.toml file to define additional folders of licenses for which reuse lint does not complain when their licenses are not additionally stated.

cordlandwehr avatar Sep 10 '24 14:09 cordlandwehr