Re: GAP's (non)freeness ?

[sal@dcs.st-and.ac.uk]

Thanks for the offers, and obviously we can't stop you taking the released 
version of GAP and repackaging it as you wish, but I think we'll take out 
time and think through how we'd like to proceed on this one. 

GAP is a big complicated piece of software (or set of pieces) and there are 
lots of things we need to think about:

1. Which files are actually source files? This is not always obvious
2. How we would break the system up into packages and what the dependencies 
between them would be?
3. What paths, configuration options and so on to use for a Debian or RPM version?
4. Whether it is time to abandon zoo (which is becoming troublesome from a 
compressing side on MacOS)?
5. Version and bugfix numbering issues.

We say that GAP is copyright us and distributed under the GPL. and we have a 
one-line copyright header in many files. We include a copy of the GPL In the 
distro.  I am happy to change any old language which might be seen as incompatible with
the GPL. I am not sure why this is not adequate.

I am not willing to rush into adopting any particular scheme of
packaging or copyright labelling without discussion among the developers and
some thought, just because it is the convention. 

Many of the developers will be meeting around the end of the month. We can 
discuss these issues then and consider what changes to make for the next major 
release, probably in the summer. 

	Steve Linton


> So, my proposal is to you : 
> 1. I will update the license in all the files (putting a copyright
> headers on the files)
> 
> 2. Help create updated DEB out of the  CVS
> wait, they are now available 4.3 is here :
> http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2002/debian-devel-200212/msg01214.html
> 
> 3. I will supply you with cvs patches to fix the copyright issue.
> 
> 4. The debian source packages are great, because they can be used as a
> normal tgz. That way you can avoid this entire zoo issue. TGZ works
> fine on all systems.
> 
> please advice as how you want to handle this?
> 
> mike

-- 
Steve Linton	School of Computer Science  &
      Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Computational Algebra
	     University of St Andrews 	 Tel   +44 (1334) 463269
http://www.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~sal	 Fax   +44 (1334) 463278