Re: MUMmer patches and Artistic license.
On Thu, Jul 02, 2009 at 01:47:12PM +0900, Charles Plessy wrote:
> Hi Andreas and Steffen,
>
> Taking a new upstream release as an opportunity, I have made a lot of
> modifications to the mummer package. The current version in Debian relies
> heavily on patches that are not documented and not always suitable for
> upstream.
We should reduce the patches which are not suitable for upstream to a bare
minimum which is really needed.
> I converted the pacakge from CDBS to debhelper in order to be able to
> drop most of the patches.
Nice to see that debhelper 7 also enables quite compact rules files.
(I should have RTFMed since a long time ...)
> The first question I would like to ask is the
> function of the changes made to the C++ sources of the ???annotate???.
>
> http://patch-tracking.debian.net/patch/series/view/mummer/3.20-3/01sm_src_tigr.diff
See
http://lists.debian.org/debian-med/2007/11/msg00045.html
> I am not sure if that was the purpose, but I noticed that ???annotate??? was
> renamed ???mummer-annotate???, which makes us compliant with the Artistic license
> under which it is released.
The reason was not the license but a name space polution. Imagemagick
has a tool called annotate. We should teach upstream not to use generic
names!
> But in addition some C shell programs were replaced
> by Bourne shell counterparts, without being renamed. What would you recommend?
> Drop the changes and ship the C shell versions, or forward the Bourne versions
> upstream and ask permission for using them?
I would try to avoid artificial C shell dependency. If teaching upstream
is no option I would vote for a rename. But this is just my personal
opinion and I would not heavily insist on it. So feel free to decide
what might be the best option.
Thanks for working on this
Andreas.
--
http://fam-tille.de
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