Lint: please add "detected-spdx-license-missmatch" linter

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
go
Domain
cli, tooling

Research direction

Begin by finding the existing lint-check entry point and related tests in wolfictl; the issue does not name specific files. Compare a package's detected SPDX license with its declared license, and define completion as warning on mismatches while honoring #nolint overrides.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

enhancement needs-triage

Description

Please add a new lint check. Use a license detector (for example https://github.com/go-enry/go-license-detector/tree/master) to detect the SPDX license of given package.

Compare it to the declared SPDX license. And raise a warning if they missmatch.

Allow humans to fix the license to match to the detected one. Or override the lint check with #nolint in case of confusing / undetectable licensing.

Real world example on a large code base

$ time license-detector /tmp/gcc-13.2.0
/tmp/gcc-13.2.0
	99%	GCC-exception-3.1
	99%	LGPL-2.1-only
	99%	deprecated_LGPL-2.1
	99%	LGPL-2.1-or-later
	99%	deprecated_LGPL-2.1+
	98%	deprecated_GPL-3.0-with-GCC-exception
	97%	deprecated_GPL-2.0+
	97%	GPL-2.0-or-later
	97%	GPL-2.0-only
	97%	deprecated_GPL-2.0

real	0m4.400s
user	0m5.240s
sys	0m0.171s

Declared license in the package

$ git grep license gcc.yaml
gcc.yaml:    - license: GPL-3.0-or-later

Which is incorrect.

Dominant language
Go
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Forks
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Avg merge
7d 7h
Merged PRs (30d)
15

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