It happened to me several times that I did: cd sci-biology/foo git add ../../license/foo git add * repoman commit * ../../license/foo while expecting repoman (like git) will put into the commit all the files. Now, after months and occasional complaints from other devs that I did not add a license file ... I finaly realized what is going on. Justin Lecher says this is not a bug in repoman and it only works inside a package directory. Maybe, but then I propose to at least print on STDERR that one of the file scheduled (sorry, no, I mean one of the files included on the commandline in ARGS) for a commit was ignored. Or maybe extend the functionality? ;-)
Not sure about this, repoman is only for packages. There are other things in tree that are not packages. For licenses, eclasses, profiles, and other things you do not use repoman to commit, just use git commit. I would recommend to close as invalid, as it is not proper use of repoman. It might seem repoman is for an entire repository. But all repoman cares about is package depgraph, and other ebuild related QA issues.
Seems repoman may be used for some things like eclasses (bug# 64258) that would benefit from a digest/signature to ensure it is not modified. I do not think such would apply to License files.
For MetaManifest (bug 349026), the goal is to be able to verify the integrity of the *entire* tree, which obviously includes the licenses. Bug 390651 is related, in the sense that it would be bad to commit a ebuild which inherits an eclass that has uncommitted changes. Also, it would be bad to commit an ebuild which has a dependency on another ebuild which has not been committed.
Also, it's bad to commit an ebuild when the profiles and/or metadata directories have uncommitted changes.
repoman support has been removed per bug 835013. Please file a new bug (or, I suppose, reopen this one) if you feel this check is still applicable to pkgcheck and doesn't already exist.