Cargo: check license is valid SPDX license expression

[RAnders00]

What it does

If a license field is defined in Cargo.toml, checks the contents to be a valid SPDX 2.1 license expression.

https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/reference/manifest.html#the-license-and-license-file-fields
https://spdx.org/spdx-specification-21-web-version#h.jxpfx0ykyb60 (Appendix IV: SPDX License Expressions)
https://github.com/spdx/license-list-data/tree/v3.6

idstring              = 1*(ALPHA / DIGIT / “-” / “.” )

license-id            = <short form license identifier in Appendix I.1>

license-exception-id  = <short form license exception identifier in Appendix I.2>

license-ref           = [“DocumentRef-“1*(idstring)”:”]”LicenseRef-“1*(idstring)

simple-expression = license-id / license-id”+” / license-ref

compound-expression =  1*1(simple-expression /
                 simple-expression “WITH” license-exception-id /
                 compound-expression “AND” compound-expression /
                 compound-expression “OR” compound-expression ) /
                     “(“ compound-expression “)“ )
license-expression =  1*1(simple-expression / compound-expression)

Categories (optional)

• Kind: clippy::cargo

I'm not actually sure, it might be that crates.io check the license field to be a valid expression. Even if that's the case, then it would still be nice to catch this sort of mistake earlier.

The lint should probably also deny specifying multiple licenses with /, which according to the documentation (see link above) is still accepted but not recommended:

Previously multiple licenses could be separated with a /, but that usage is deprecated.

Drawbacks

None that I can think of.

Example

E.g. MIT OR XD would be denied, since the XD license is not known. MIT/Apache-2.0 would get denied due to the deprecated slash syntax. An empty string would also get denied.

[ebroto]

The only drawback that I can think of is that alternative crate registries may not require respecting this standard as the documentation states that this is enforced by crates.io.

[epage]

See also rust-lang/cargo#2039