Re: DFSG and assembler code

[Albert Huang <alberth.debian@gmail.com>]

Hello,

On Wed, Aug 21, 2013 at 4:01 AM, Andreas B. Mundt <andi@debian.org> wrote:

With the current version, the Z80 ROM dumpers (ti73 - ti86) are built
using spasm, which is not packaged for Debian, and the 68k ROM dumpers
(ti89 - v200) are built using tigcc/gcc4ti, which is also free
software, but not packaged for Debian either.

To be able to compile the program with standard tools, the
pre-compiled code of the ROM-dumpers is included in the source.  This
code needs to be removed for DFSG reasons.

So for the time being, I fear we have to live with not supporting ROM
dumps - if you have an idea how to solve the issue please let me
know. The package is available here:

<URL:http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=debian-science/packages/libticalcs.git>

The spasm Z80 assembler is relatively easy to package, and we should have no problem packaging that to satisfy the need for a compiler (or rather, assembler) to produce the binaries for the Z80 ROM dumpers.

However, TIGCC/GCC4TI is another problem, in that the tool is a heavily patched outdated version of binutils/gcc, and that it has a very strange developer environment in order to function. (Specifically, it relies on shell scripts to produce binaries, and requires a certain TIGCC environmental variable to do anything...) I'm in discussion with upstream on what could be done to resolve this. But that probably deserves another email/thread on debian-mentors...

Thanks!
Albert