licensePattern configuration accepts any string if pattern match fails

[dennismphil]

Scenario 1 (Works as expected)

No licensePattern - Shows error

Scenario 2 (Not working as expected)

With licensePattern - Shows no error

Environment

• Node version: 17.9.0
• ESLint version 8.12.0
• eslint-plugin-jsdoc version: 39.2.9

[brettz9]

Yes, this change was made by design as part of #884.

(The previous behavior had not been documented as such, so I tweaked it to allow for the regex to allow for opting out.)

The match now is intended to capture the area to be validated, so if you want to ensure that missing license patterns are caught, you should design your regex to eagerly match content (e.g., by use of | and/or *).

Closing as that should address though feel free to comment further as needed.

[dennismphil]

@brettz9 Thanks for the response.

Scenario 2: 
Here the pattern to match is provided as "black". The linter is not failing even if the given license block is missing the string "black".

[brettz9]

The regex is just to find the zone which ought to identify any string area to be checked. If a zone is not found, then it is treated as valid.

[dennismphil]

How do we enforce a particular string pattern to be present in the license block?

[brettz9]

You should I think be able to use jsdoc/match-description for such.

[dennismphil]

I believe that is for the @description field and not for @license block. 

Feedback: The current implementation of licensePattern is not quite intuitive. One would expect a pattern to match with a given string and fail if it does not match.

The match-description also gives a great example of how the error message is shown when the pattern match fails.

[brettz9]

match-description can be used with specific tags, including @license. Use the tags option.

Regarding the feedback, we can add more descriptive text in the docs, but I believe we need some way to define a zone such that missing matches can pass validation.