Possible GPL violation in package distribution

Dres> OK. I hate to bring this up, but looking at it the person Dres> who reported this bug to me looks to have a point. I don't see one, just a hyperactive imagination. All .debs suffer from the same "bug." None of them have debian/rules in them, but many have scripts which are surely source code. The GPL doesn't say that just because you provide some sources in a particular medium you have to provide them all that way. Nor does it say anything about replicating the binary you have, only about access to the sources used to build the binary. Debian doesn't keep even one past copy of .diff.gz on its servers, let alone all of them for three years!! Do you have a global CVS repository? If not, you guys are all in big trouble by that argument.... 1. We're basically covered in spirit under GPL 3(b); every XEmacs installation that handles packages (>=20.4) should have instructions for how to get to cvs.xemacs.org. So maybe we have to add a README to every package. 2. In the case of .el -> .elc, emacs itself is the Makefile! For an individual .el, M-x byte-compile-file is all that's necessary in most cases. M-x byte-recompile-directory for whole packages. Where something more complex is needed, as with VM and I believe Gnus, we do supply the upstream Makefile. If we don't it's a bug, but only in the particular package. The scripts and so on that exist in the xemacs-packages hierarchy are mostly concerned with building the distribution, not with .el -> .elc compilation. AFAIK, the GPL does not require that you provide the tools to recreate the distribution tarballs, merely the software. To the extent that the clean environment affects the build, the user would have to check out the same version of XEmacs, build it the same way, and check out all the packages (in compilation, a (require ...) basically includes the macros in the required file, and they get inlined). Nobody in free software provides that level of replicability, I don't see why we should be burdened with it. -- University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences Tel/fax: +81 (298) 53-5091 _________________ _________________ _________________ _________________ What are those straight lines for? "XEmacs rules."