Re: RFC: proposed GPLv3 license exception draft

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hi Karl,

* Karl Berry wrote on Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 12:17:54AM CEST:
>     minimally verbose, non-debugging and non-tracing output 
> 
> I'm not sure whether "minimally verbose" means "not verbose at all" or
> "only a low level of verbosity".  I'm further confused because I
> associate "verbose" with -v, but I didn't think affected the output,
> only the reporting to stdout/err.

"minimally verbose" refers to what is put into the configure script,
which is the primary output of autoconf.  Is this too confusing?

> Is "minimally verbose" supposed to just be a generalization of
> "non-debugging" and "non-tracing"?

No, I think "minimally verbose" is intended to prevent, for example,
that the configure script, in addition to its normal contents, also
contains all of the macro files that come with Autoconf.  Otherwise,
you could just get at the complete Autoconf sources that way, and then,
under the terms of the Exception, use them with any license you want.

>     "Eligible Output Material" may be comprised only of Covered Code
>     that (a) must necessarily appear in Autoconf-generated configure
>     scripts and (b) is required for those configure scripts to function.
> 
> What about blank lines, comments, extra white space in the generated
> configure scripts?  They aren't "required" for functioning, and the
> definition says (a) "and" (b).  Yet clearly they should be Covered.

I suppose a strict reading could mean that.  Brett asked before whether
there were for example lots of unused functions in the output script,
which may be problematic (or alternatively a burden to remove).  With
shell functions and other actual shell code, at least the current
implementation of Autoconf is pretty efficient in that generated scripts
only contain very little code that is not used under any circumstances.

But Brett did not speak about comments and extra white space.  I will
ask about that.  I'm assuming this should be fixable easily, if it even
needs to be fixed.

Cheers,
Ralf