Hi, thanks for reporting. I also intended to make such a proposal and I had briefly mentioned it in bug #883966. [1]
The reason why the short form is allowed is because of Debian Policy 12.5 "Packages distributed under the Apache license (version 2.0), the Artistic license, the GNU GPL (versions 1, 2, or 3), the GNU LGPL (versions 2, 2.1, or 3), the GNU FDL (versions 1.2 or 1.3), and the Mozilla Public License (version 1.1 or 2.0) should refer to the corresponding files under /usr/share/common-licenses, [9] rather than quoting them in the copyright file." I agree that using boiler plate like this: | License: GPL-2+ | On Debian systems the full text of the GPL-2 can be found in | /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-2 is still redundant. I suggest to change Debian Policy 12.5 and copyright format 1.0 in such a way that the following syntax is allowed: License: [GPL-2+] This would imply the license is identical to the one we ship under /usr/share/common-licenses/. Services like sources.debian.org could easily parse this field and automatically link to the full license-text. I don't have a fixation about using brackets. We could also use something else. In the above case Lintian should not warn about a missing standalone license or license text in general. Regards, Markus [1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=883966#25
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