On Sat, Jun 01, 2019 at 12:22:42PM +0900, Masahiro Yamada wrote:
Prior to the adoption of SPDX, it was difficult for tools to determine the correct license due to incomplete or badly formatted license text. The SPDX solves this issue, assuming people can correctly spell "SPDX-License-Identifier" although this assumption is broken in some places.
Since scripts/spdxcheck.py parses only lines that exactly matches to the correct tag, it cannot (should not) detect this kind of error.
If the correct tag is missing, scripts/checkpatch.pl warns like this:
WARNING: Missing or malformed SPDX-License-Identifier tag in line *
So, people should notice it before the patch submission, but in reality broken tags sometimes slip in. The checkpatch warning is not useful for checking the committed files globally since large number of files still have no SPDX tag.
Also, I am not sure about the legal effect when the SPDX tag is broken.
Anyway, these typos are absolutely worth fixing. It is pretty easy to find suspicious lines by grep.
$ git grep --not -e SPDX-License-Identifier --and -e SPDX- -- \ :^LICENSES :^scripts/spdxcheck.py :^*/license-rules.rst arch/arm/kernel/bugs.c:// SPDX-Identifier: GPL-2.0 drivers/phy/st/phy-stm32-usbphyc.c:// SPDX-Licence-Identifier: GPL-2.0 drivers/pinctrl/sh-pfc/pfc-r8a77980.c:// SPDX-Lincense-Identifier: GPL 2.0 lib/test_stackinit.c:// SPDX-Licenses: GPLv2 sound/soc/codecs/max9759.c:// SPDX-Licence-Identifier: GPL-2.0
Signed-off-by: Masahiro Yamada yamada.masahiro@socionext.com
Very nice catch, thanks! I'll go queue this up now.
greg k-h