Re: Dpkg in Ocaml
On Thu, Dec 05, 2002 at 04:16:24PM +0100, Sven Luther wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 05, 2002 at 06:32:16AM -0800, David Brown wrote:
> > On Thu, Dec 05, 2002 at 08:15:27AM +0100, Sven Luther wrote:
> >
> > > Now, another problem is that a coq/ocaml solution is something very very
> > > remote from what debian developpers are used to, and the step to entry
> > > for people to work on it and do modification and bug fixes (or more
> > > probably new features, since hopefully there would be no bugs) would be
> > > quite high.
> >
> > There is a deeper, fundamental, issue here. The ocaml compiler doesn't
> > comply with the Debian Free Software Guidelines, it is in the non-free
> > section. (This library does).
>
> Err, what are you speaking about ? both ocaml and coq are in main, and
> this since i took over maintainership in 98, well, at least since
> shortly thereafter, don't remember well. There still was some issues,
> but they were solved,a and even RMS gave its benediction. So ocaml is
> today not less free than gcc, so i don't see what you are speaking about.
To be more exact, slink shipped with ocaml 1.05, which was non-free,
potato shipped with ocaml 2.04 which was in main.
I took over maintainership with 1.07, and approached upstream about
these issues, and by the time of the potato release ocaml was released
under a dual LGPL/QPL licence (which is ok, the QPL is only problematic
with the GPL, not the QPL, look at debian-legal archives for this).
There were still some issues with one of the libraries, and after having
taken advice from RMS (see the caml list archive for detail) the ocaml
team decided to use the same kind of exeption that gcc enjoys.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
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