Walter Landry wrote:
The GPL mentions whole works, and I have given my criteria of a whole work: Requires to run. The Debian Depends: relationship is also useful and mostly equivalent. I have not seen any other criteria which matches what the GPL actually says. As I mentioned before, I am open to discussion on what the criteria should be, but it does have to match what the GPL says.
As your reasoning seems to be clouded by Eclipse being interpreted by Kaffe, let's go one step away from that, and just take some other tool, that's needed for eclipse to run. Let's take your 'it requires some GPLd tool to run, so it's undistributable' argument and run with it. :)
In order to run eclipse, you need to get it installed first. You can't run what's not installed. So an installation of eclipse is necessarily 'required to run' it. To do an installation, an installer is required, and it's 'required to run' that installer. A convenient mechanism for installing eclipse in Debian is apt. So you'd run 'apt-get install eclipse'.
But that requires GPLd apt-get to run. So in order to get eclipse to run, regardless of the license of runtime, one GPLd tool is 'required to run' for eclipse to run. Do you think apt-get and eclipse would form an indistributable 'whole work'? :)
But there is only one Java 2 runtime in main that will work. You seem to have missed it the three other times I mentioned it, but this discussion is about whether Eclipse goes in main, not whether it is distributable at all.
Sure, but the whole 'main', 'non-free', 'contrib'. 'non-us' separation business is a (very useful and sane) distinction made by debian, not by the GPL, which only cares about GPL-compatible and incompatible works.
Either Elipse and Kaffe are distributable, which you seem to agree with, then they can be distributed along whatever criteria the distributor comes up with, like putting them in main, printing them on the same roll of kitchen paper, or sending them in space on the same russian ISS supply capsule's entertainment DVD of the month. Or they are not distributable together, then the distributor can't print them on the same roll of kitchen paper, regardless of chosing one side for Kaffe and the other for Eclipse, or not. :)
To me, it's quite obvious that since they are distributable, independant works, they can be distributed on the same medium, and that's what the GPL says, and the FSF does. [1]
cheers, dalibor topic[1] Not everything distributed from ftp.gnu.org is under the GPL, even though some works are, and they 'require' GPL'd works like GNU Bash or gcc 'to' get so far as to 'run' in Debian, afaict from the buildd logs. :)