Re: GAP's (non)freeness ?
--- sal@dcs.st-and.ac.uk wrote:
> 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.
That is why I am asking. To be honest, I have a huge open task list :
http://wiki.dotgnu.org/DotGNUPeople_2fMikeDuPont
I dont want to add too much more.
>From the mails that I have seen, and from the FAQ:
I conclude the following :
Correct me if i am wrong
1. You do not support the current debian packaging
because there is no mention of it on the webpage.
2. You are not aware of how far it is, it seems to have 3.4 covered in
testing.
> 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
Source files are files that are interpreted by a program to produce
results. A program. For logical programs, and if you put them under the
GPL, then you get into a very tricky licensing issue.
That means you cannot make non-free tools that are derived works of the
GPLed code. If you are getting into the issue of logical and reflective
programming languages, then this opens up the same issues that I have
been researching into with the introspector :
seem my latest mail on fsl-discuss :
http://lists.alt.org/pipermail/fsl-discuss/2003-February/000718.html
This may be interesting to you :
http://www.crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3:sss:6391:200301:bhkfkonfkjemkcebmknk#b
> 2. How we would break the system up into packages and what the
> dependencies
> between them would be?
you can make different debs for each lib. Debian will handle all those
packages. Take a look at perl.
> 3. What paths, configuration options and so on to use for a Debian or
> RPM version?
There are standards for debian,
it is handled by the installer routine.
> 4. Whether it is time to abandon zoo (which is becoming troublesome
> from a
> compressing side on MacOS)?
Well, zoo is not compatible with debian packages,
the standard for dpkgs are tgz. I would suggest that you use debian
source packages for your standard source package distro, they are the
best.
> 5. Version and bugfix numbering issues.
ok, that is your decision.
>
> 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.
you mean the language of the license statement?
I am just offering to put a standard header. You dont need it.
> 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.
that is why i asked. ;)
>
> 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.
>
looking forward to hearing from you.
mike
=====
James Michael DuPont
http://introspector.sourceforge.net/
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