Package: lintian Version: 2.5.66 Severity: normal Sphinx always wants to include a copy of the licence of the documentation within the sources and it always includes the .rst sources of the documentation in amongst the compiled text. This means that maintainers either end up ignoring or overriding this tag; there is a cost associated with both. (Worse, the overridden tag reappears when sphinx changes its file license.txt to license.rst.txt.)
An example was recently cited on debian-devel@ [1] but with 1391 packages warning of this and it being overridden 759 times [2], that's a unacceptably poor hit rate for a lintian tag; lintian is not wrong that there is a file called license.txt there but it is wrong to assert that the maintainer could or should do something in this situation. [1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2017/12/msg00609.html [2] https://lintian.debian.org/tags/extra-license-file.html Lintian could recognise sphinx documentation and not complain about including the licence within it; not complaining about _sources/license.txt and _sources/license.rst.txt should achieve that.
