Add liccheck to gate CI on dependency license compliance

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
58/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Quiet
Tech stack
python
Domain
ci-cd, documentation, security

Research direction

Start by inspecting setup.cfg, the development and CI dependency definitions, the Makefile entry points, CI configuration, and DEVELOPER_GUIDE.md. Confirm how liccheck represents the proposed license allowlist and blocklist, then verify that the make target and CI job fail on an unapproved dependency license and that the developer documentation explains the check.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Summary

Add liccheck with an authorised-license
allowlist in setup.cfg so that CI fails if any (transitive) Python dependency carries an
unapproved license (e.g. GPL, LGPL, or ASF Category X licenses).

Motivation

  • Apache Superset uses liccheck to automatically flag problematic transitive deps
  • Known issue: certifi is MPL-2.0 (ASF Category B — allowed with attribution, not
    bundled); liccheck will surface this and similar cases
  • Avoids manual license audits when adding or upgrading dependencies

Proposed changes

  1. Add [liccheck] section to setup.cfg (or a liccheck.ini) with:
    • authorized_licenses allowlist (Apache-2.0, MIT, BSD-*, ISC, Python-2.0, …)
    • unauthorized_licenses blocklist (GPL, LGPL, AGPL, …)
  2. Add liccheck to dev/CI dependencies
  3. Add make liccheck target
  4. Integrate into CI pipeline (fail on unapproved licenses)
  5. Document in DEVELOPER_GUIDE.md

References

Dominant language
Python
Stars
3
Forks
5
Avg merge
5d 17h
Merged PRs (30d)
8

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

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