Re: Flogging a dead horse....
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"B. Douglas Hilton" <bdhilton@charter.net> writes:
> (I guess the horse isn't dead after all)
>
> What about in my case, I forked the code because upstream vanished
> six years ago. I jump from 1.5 (original) to 1.7 (my version). I made
> some major mods to it and had a 1.6, then I added autotools support
> and bumped it to 1.7. The diff from 1.5 to 1.7 is bigger than the
> source for 1.7!
That's not the point. The Debian diff is only going to contain the
differences between the Debianised source and the released official
upstream tarball. It can be empty--it's there for any changes you
need to make to be packaging for the duration of a single upstream
version, and any extra patches you need to apply to the upstream
source.
For example, this fixes a trivial bug and a missing dependency:
gimp-print (4.2.5-2) unstable; urgency=low
* cupsys-driver-gimpprint: cups-genppdupdate will not die if grep exits with
a nonzero status (for example, there are no Gimp-Print PPDs in use).
(Closes: #179137)
* cupsys-driver-gimpprint: Depend on libcompress-zlib-perl, since dh_perl
doesn't compute module dependencies.
(Closes: #179120, #179170, #179171, #179203)
-- Roger Leigh <roger@whinlatter.uklinux.net> Fri, 31 Jan 2003 23:26:51 +0000
gimp-print (4.2.5-1) unstable; urgency=low
* New stable release
[...]
* The CUPS epson backend uses non-blocking I/O, and so will not hang with
some models when no status readback data is sent.
-- Roger Leigh <roger@whinlatter.uklinux.net> Wed, 29 Jan 2003 11:37:49 +0000
> Although after studying Policy, I really should separate the drum
> patches from the main package and put them in xdrum-data perhaps,
> since it does build on other architectures now.
What do you mean? Would drum-data just be arch-independent data? How
does this relate to any patches?
> Maybe I should rename it to reflect the fork, like xdrum -> dxdrum ?
I wouldn't. If it's the de-facto xdrum package, call it xdrum. For
example, ssh is really OpenSSH, but the "real" ssh is proprietary, and
cannot be distributed in main.
> I haven't been able to contact Olof Astrand (the original author) for
> about five years. The original license was Public Domain / send him
> an email. I GPL'd it, and have kept his original readme intact. One
> of my only questions is he had a copyright notice in the title bar
> which I removed, although I have otherwise respected his copyright
> notices in the code and such. What is the status when source is
> public domain according to its readme yet includes scattered
> copyrights here and there. Obviously since I hacked code in too, he
> doesn't have the exclusive copyright anymore, and its not appropriate
> that the title bar credit only him (he didn't write it all anyways).
In this case, the legal status of xdrum is unclear. Parts of it are
copyrighted by Olof Astrand, and parts by you. Whatever the original
license, you cannot /re-license/ (e.g. GPL) any code copyrighted by
him without his permission (since he retains the right to relicense
it).
"Public domain" means the "absence of copyright protection" [foldoc].
The fact that he has copyrighted some parts does confuse the issue. I
would err on the side of caution. In the UK, "public domain" does not
have any legal status, so the copyright is presumably still standing.
> I'd like to contact him but the dude seems to have vanished from
> the face of the internet. Hope he's making the big bucks :-)
If you know what country he lived in (Scandinavia?), I would try
making enquiries to find his phone number, address or relatives who
can help you (or try google?). I think this is important and
necessary before xdrum can enter Debian.
In reality, there shouldn't be a problem, but you do need to ensure
that all the code is 100% legal WRT copyright and licensing. If in
doubt, I'd leave everything in the public domain, or re-write the
copyrighted portions from scratch.
Regards,
Roger
- --
Roger Leigh
Printing on GNU/Linux? http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net/
GPG Public Key: 0x25BFB848 available on public keyservers
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