Reuse Compatability

[schmidtw]

I changed a go project I have over to use spdx & the FSF's reuse tooling to attempt to make things more clear & simpler to manage. It looks like this license checker doesn't handle looking in a LICENSES directory for the SPDX licenses. The purpose for this issue is to see if that is something the maintainers here would be willing to accept a change for.

For reference, this is what reuse shows for it's structuring:
https://reuse.software/tutorial/#result

Here is my project (that uses the reuse cli tool):
https://github.com/schmidtw/goschtalt/tree/main/LICENSES

Of note is that the code isn't dual licensed (meaning it's available under both) but parts are covered by one license and other are covered by a different license.

[oliverpool]

I face the same issue with my repo: https://codeberg.org/pfad.fr/vanitydoc/src/branch/main/LICENSES (I don't even have a LICENSE file, since it shouldn't be needed).

Instead of looking for the LICENSES folder, the tool should directly check the SPDX-License-Identifier headers.

As such, the documentation of my package is not displayed on pkg.go.dev (luckily the goal of this package is to enable self-hosting documentation: https://code.pfad.fr/vanitydoc ;)

[wombelix]

I hit the same problem today, but I wonder if this repo is the right place to propose a fix?
My understanding is that licensecheck accepts a license text as input and then detects which license it is.
I don't see a reason why this would fail in the context of Reuse.

The actual logic to use it and identify which file to scan sits in https://github.com/golang/pkgsite. And that repo expects issues to be raised in https://github.com/golang/go, where the related one (golang/go#40586) was then closed last week:

We currently have no cycles to add the LICENSES directory. I would pursue other options.

And as far I can tell from a brief check, this line is part of the logic that would need to be changed:
https://github.com/golang/pkgsite/blob/8bad909da0cbaf239510644c5a91d1be27376d9f/internal/licenses/licenses.go#L452
Seem to bail out on Directories and only consider Files, not even Symlinks, in the project root.

So I guess the only way forward for a permanent solution would be to contribute a PR in https://github.com/golang/pkgsite.

The workaround till then is a redundant copy of the relevant license file in the project root as it's for example brought up in gocsaf/csaf#599.