aboutcode-org / aboutcode-org/scancode-toolkit

Override license detection by checksum

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enhancement license scan policy
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Python
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Description

While scanning some repositories, notably SignalR, we routinely come across files identified with an unknown license. Typically, this is because the file both mentions a license, and makes a reference to an external license file, where the latter is then matched as unknown. See for instance `unknown_19.RULE` for a popular one in SignalR.

In conjunction with defining a policy with `--license-policy`, this is not ideal: you hardly want to claim neither yay nor nay about unknown licenses, without looking at the files in question individually.

What I've ended up doing is that I adapted our wrapper around ScanCode with a post-process step:

1. For any file with an `unknown` license match, check in `whitelist.txt`, which for each line contains a sha1:license tuple.
2. If the file's sha1 matches a sha1 in the whitelist, override ScanCodes unknown with the identified license.
3. Any files still matched as `unknown`, output this as part of the report in the same format for manual identification and addition to `whitelist.txt`.

This could probably be improved quite a bit if done in ScanCode, but it would move ScanCode further in the direction of being a compliance toolkit, rather than a scanner, so it might be that it wouldn't fit the roadmap.

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