Re: [comp.emacs.xemacs] AUCTeX 11.84 released
"Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen(a)xemacs.org> writes:
Nobody ever claimed that there was a legal difference. Simply that
David's claims about what must be distributed in a derivative of
AUCTeX are invalid.
That's what you say. However, you don't bother to explain why the
explicit demand from the GPL suddenly ceases to be relevant when
XEmacs is involved.
> David> In either case, XEmacs central decides that it needs
not
> David> distribute the build infrastructure (whether from AUCTeX or
> David> from XEmacs) along with the binary package in order to
> David> comply with the GPL.
>
> I wasn't aware that there are legal issues here. Please explain?
David's claim is that to comply with the GPL, we must distribute the
packaging system with every package,
That is not what I claim. You must distribute the _package-specific_
parts of the build system (the files that are missing in order to
build the binary from its parts, one file included by the Makefile)
along with a package.
citing the part of the GPL that says "The source code for a
work
means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it.
For an executable work, complete source code means all the source
code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface
definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and
installation of the executable."
I disagree with David's claim.
You mean that you disagree with the straw man you build from my actual
claim.
I believe that the installed package is a perfectly good source
package as defined by the GPL.
Too bad that the files for building it are missing: and exactly that
is what has been keeping AUCTeX from being updated for more than a
year: those files are not optional for building an XEmacs package.
It is not the original package, of course; it is a derivative. The
GPL explicitly permits making derivatives. That's so even if they
lack some of the convenience, or even the functionality, of the
original.
And the derivative has to come with the complete source to the
derivative, not the complete source to the original (not that you
would include the build files for the original, either, so it is not
conceivable how you arrive at the claim that you include all the
scripts used to compile the package). This does not mean the build
structure from the package system (that is an independent work), but
it does mean the package-specific templates and Makefiles.
--
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum
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