LICENSE file in repo root is ignored

[derpsteb]

Hey everyone,

according to the Go Modules Reference the go command would use a LICENSE file from the repo root if it can not find one in the module's directory and is currently not in the repo's root dir.

However, it seems like go-licenses currently does not replicate this behavior. At least I am getting an error along the lines of:
Failed to find license for modulename: cannot find a known open source license for "path/to/module" whose name matches regexp ^(?i)((UN)?LICEN(S|C)E|COPYING|README|NOTICE).*$ and locates up until "path/to/module/.."

Even though the root folder of the repo that contains the submodule modulename has a valid LICENSE file in the root folder.

Should I look elsewhere for a reason or is this really not supported? :P

Best.

[Bobgy]

The mentioned behavior is already replicated by go when it downloads module caches.

Are you talking about modules in your main repo?

[Bobgy]

Besides, can you share a repo that can reproduce this error?

[derpsteb]

To reproduce the error you could run:

git clone https://github.com/edgelesssys/constellation.git && cd constellation && rm ./operators/constellation-node-operator/api/LICENSE && go-licenses check ./...

Sorry, the repo is a bit big, but it should be easily reproduce the problem.
We have a monorepo and the offending module is a submodule within that repo.

[jmdeal]

As another example, we're taking a dependency on github.com/awslabs/amazon-eks-ami/nodeadm. The repo, https://github.com/awslabs/amazon-eks-ami has a LICENSE file in its root but go-licenses returns the following error:

E0216 14:22:47.917881   39990 library.go:122] Failed to find license for github.com/awslabs/amazon-eks-ami/nodeadm/api/v1alpha1: cannot find a known open source license for "/Users/jmdeal/go/pkg/mod/github.com/awslabs/amazon-eks-ami/nodeadm@v0.0.0-20240212193458-d97e2ad07de4/api/v1alpha1" whose name matches regexp ^(?i)((UN)?LICEN(S|C)E|COPYING|README|NOTICE).*$ and locates up until "/Users/jmdeal/go/pkg/mod/github.com/awslabs/amazon-eks-ami/nodeadm@v0.0.0-20240212193458-d97e2ad07de4"

Additionally, when I looked in the local copy of the module the LICENSE file did in-fact exist.