Support for (collected) license files via directories, globs, list files

[mbargull]

Actual Behavior

Currently, we can specify either single files or a list of files for the about: license_file: field.

In some language ecosystems like Rust or Go it is common to vendor dependencies.
The license files of these dependencies are then included in the source distributions but often/usually there is no readily composed list of them available. Hence, it would make sense to use helper scripts during the build to gather a list of those license files and use that list as an input for the about: license_file: field.

Expected Behavior

Allow one or more of the following:

1. Allow entries in license_file to point to directories and recursive include all files in them as "license files".
   (Appending a suffix / could be made a requirement to make this behavior opt-in.)
2. Allow (recursive) globs in license_file entries to be given instead of only static file names.
3. Allow some additional syntax to recognize entries in license_file not as "license files" directly, but just as list files.
   (e.g., have a gather_licenses script create a ${SRC_DIR}/thirdparty-licenses file in which every line references the actual license files and have license_file: <some new syntax>thirdparty-licenses expand to the file list.)

All of the options above bare the possibility to accidentally include additional non-license files. But I believe it can be rather subjective to judge if one or the other is more prone to it. Hence, I think all of them more or less equally good and I would probably go with the one that is easiest to use and document*, i.e., option 1.

(* usage instruction could be simple as "move thirdparty license files to a $SRC_DIR/additional-licenses folder and add to license_file an entry additional-licenses/ (ending with / to denote a directory for which all files are included recursively)".)

[mbargull]

This feature request is only for the license_file field and not the license field. One could argue that it would be nice to parse all these additional licenses and compose a SPDX license expression (or a similar summary) from them. That, however, would be an elaborate undertaking and should be a separate feature request -- and, frankly, composing such expressions/summary should be done in a separate tool, IMO.

[github-actions]

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