Bug#219595: libffi2: Licensing problems

[Etienne Gagnon <etienne.gagnon@uqam.ca>]

Hmmm,

I have a problem actually building the sources.  e.g.:

$ apt-get source libffi2
$ cd gcc-3.3-3.3.2ds4/
$ tar -xjvf gcc-3.3.2.tar.bz2
$ cd gcc-3.3.2/libffi/
$ ./configure

I can trust gcc people might have been careful about license, but it seems
pretty difficult to me to build libffi without building gcc first.

If libffi really has no dependency on gcc, it should be easy to simply build
libffi without having the gcc source code around.  The current libffi2 source
package (i.e. gcc) does not seem to exhibit this.

I really think it would be best to split both packages apart.  I am willing
to maintain libffi2 & libffi2-dev if the problem is the lack of a maintainer
(I am an NM).

Rationale for split:

1- libffi2 has a damatically different license.

2- Every new version of GCC (frequent) should not trigger the upload of a
   new libffi2[-dev] package.

3- Current practice leads to mostly irrelevant content in
   /usr/share/doc/libffi2/changelog.Debian.gz .

   This makes it difficult for developers using libffi to see what changes
   were "really" made to the libffi2 package.

4- Current practice can lead to potential license problems, as we are seeing
   here (unless you can tell me about which files are used outside of .../libffi/
   to build libffi2)

Until the build procedure problem is cleared, I think the license bug remains.

Regards,

Etienne
PS: I did really try to build libffi in many ways, but I have *NOT* ran the debian build tools,
as they should not be required. "./configure ; make ; make install" should work
out-of-the box, if there are not deep source dependencies between gcc and libffi.
I do not think that even sharing install-sh files is a good idea, unless it is first
cleared on debian-legal.


--
Etienne M. Gagnon, Ph.D.             http://www.info.uqam.ca/~egagnon/
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