Re: reftex needs to be upgraded.
David Kastrup writes:
XEmacs.rules (for example) is not part of the package builder source,
Wrong example. XEmacs.rules is part of the package builder, common to
all packages, and useless without the full package infrastructure.
but is rather a control file specific for each particular package.
It
is a required part for building the package in the preferred way
True, as is true for programs such as Debian's debhelper, which is not
distributed with any Debian package (other than itself). Your mistake
is failing to realize that the *package* is not the *program* that the
GPL governs.
The "preferred way" for building the distribution medium that you
refer to is to check out the whole CVS tree (which is of course
available by anonymous CVS), and build there. That is the *only*
supported way to build an XEmacs package. In particular, *we do not
support building packages against an /installed/ tree*. (If you know
what you are doing you could check out the Makefile and only check out
the transitive closure of the REQUIRES in the Makefile.) According to
your interpretation that the tarball is the program, the only
practical way we could comply with the GPL is to distribute the entire
package source tree with[1] each package.
Since the package-specific control files required for building a
package are rather small, it is not obvious to me why you prefer
smearing egg all over your face time and again over including them
in the package.
Because any non-trivial package will fail to build without much of the
rest of the tree, and a trivial package doesn't need XEmacs.rules to
modify and rebuild in-place.
Footnotes:
[1] For some value of "with" that satisfies the GPL, of course.
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