composer validate can't find spdx-licenses.json

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

Is there a workaround for this?

a workaround until this is fixed:

cd /usr/share
sudo ln -s /usr/share/php/data data

Confirmed that this still definitely fails in a clean 16.04 VM. Other composer commands work fine.

Reproducing this on a clean xenial installation:

# apt install -y composer
# cat <<EOF > composer.json
{
 "name": "foo/bar",
 "description": "foo",
 "license": "GPL-3.0-or-later"
}
EOF
# composer validate

returns:

  [ErrorException]
  file_get_contents(/usr/share/php/Composer/../../data/Composer/res/spdx-licenses.json): failed to open stream: No such file or directory

However, from bionic and on, we get:

./composer.json is valid

Hence, this seems to be fixed since bionic.

Since xenial is no longer under standard support, I am closing this as fixed.