Portfile license attribute with CC0-1.0 license

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Aug 23, 2021, at 11:39, Frank Dean wrote:
> 
> 
> I am creating a Portfile for a project that uses the Creative Commons
> CC0 licence [1].  I have specified the licence in the Portfile as:
> 
>    license             CC0-1.0
> 
> [1]: https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/
> 
> Note that the first character after CC is a zero.
> 
> When I run `port lint`, I get the following error:
> 
>    Error: invalid license 'CC0-1.0': missing hyphen before version
>    --->  1 errors and 0 warnings found.
> 
> The validation logic in `portlint.tcl` is to split the string on the
> hyphen and treat it as invalid, if the last character of the first part
> is a digit.
> 
> Should I represent the CC0 licence in another way, ignore the error, or
> is a fix needed to `portlint.tcl`?

This is a portfile development question so the macports-dev mailing list would be a better place to ask.

MacPorts license checking code (port_binary_distributable.tcl) does not recognize the license name "CC0" but the license is a formalization of public domain, so just write "license public-domain". You can add a comment line above that mentioning that it's really CC0, like some other ports (mypaint-brushes, libb2) already do.

Some day we may overhaul our license handling to use SPDX identifiers but we don't use them as of this time.