Wrong format for exceptions?
@AyanSinhaMahapatra is already working on this.
Since Aug 14, 2025.
Assessment
- Difficulty
- 4/5
- Estimated time
- 3-5 days
- Newbie friendliness
- 25/100
- Issue type
- Bug
- Clarity
- Needs clarification
- Activity status
- Stale
- Tech stack
- json
- Domain
- content
Research direction
Compare the SPDX ABNF with the linked apromore, aptana, and bash exception records in the license database. First determine whether these identifiers should use LicenseRef or AdditionRef, including the proposed WITH expressions; done means the convention is confirmed and the affected records consistently follow it.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Description
I was looking into the ABNF of SPDX and was wondering about the exceptions that are listed in the Scancode licensedb.
The ABNF states:
addition-expression = license-exception-id / addition-ref
with
license-exception-id = <short form license exception identifier from SPDX License List>
addition-ref = [%s"DocumentRef-"(idstring)":"]%s"AdditionRef-"(idstring)
idstring = 1*(ALPHA / DIGIT / "-" / "." )
This brings me to the conclusion that exceptions from Scancode's license DB should start with AdditionRef instead of LicenseRef. However, currently, they start with LicenseRef, e.g.:
LicenseRef-scancode-apromore-exception-2.0LicenseRef-scancode-aptana-exception-3.0LicenseRef-scancode-bash-exception-gpl-2.0
Or is it intended to have the AdditionRef as prefix, e.g.
GPL-2.0-or-later WITH AdditionRef-LicenseRef-scancode-apromore-exception-2.0
in contrast to
GPL-2.0-or-later WITH AdditionRef-scancode-apromore-exception-2.0?
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