spdx / spdx/Spdx-Java-Library

Official Apache-1.1 license text is not being matched correctly by LicenseCompareHelper.matchingStandardLicenseIdsWithinText()

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Description

When org.spdx.utility.compare.LicenseCompareHelper.matchingStandardLicenseIdsWithinText() is run on the official Apache-1.1 license text, it fails to find any matches, and I believe I've narrowed down the problem to the Clause5 alternative text tag in the template; if I remove the example header from the license text, and run org.spdx.utility.compare.LicenseCompareHelper.isTextStandardLicense().getDifferenceMessage() on it, I get:

Variable text rule combined-bullet-Clause5 did not match the compare text starting at line #31 column #1 "5" while processing rule var: combined-bullet-Clause5

When I manually converted that <alt> tag into a Java regex, and bullet 5 from the Apache 1.1 license text is manually cleansed of comment characters and newlines, I do get a match, so I'm pretty confident the problem is in the library rather than the template. Beyond that I'm not really sure what the root cause might be - whether it has to do with comment character handling, regexification of that particular <alt> tag, or something else entirely.

This was reproduced with Spdx-Java-Library v1.11 and SPDX license list v3.23.

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Research direction

Start with LicenseCompareHelper.matchingStandardLicenseIdsWithinText() and the Clause5 alternative text tag in src/Apache-1.1.xml. Reproduce the failure using the official Apache-1.1 license text and inspect how that tag is converted and how comment characters and newlines are handled. Done means the official text matches the expected standard license without the reported Clause5 difference.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
java
Domain
tooling
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
42/100

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