Re: Packaging Inferno

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi Diego,

Diego Nicola Barbato <address@hidden> skribis:

> I have sent a patch incorporating most of your feedback to
> address@hidden (bug#33080).

Thank you, and sorry that review takes some time.  I guess that’s the
price to pay when submitting non-trivial packages.  ;-)

>> Do you know whether other FSDG distros and Debian provide these fonts?
>
> They do not provide these exact fonts but those from which some of these
> are derived (misc and jis are "based" on X fonts, vera is probably based
> on Bitstream Vera).
> It is harder to find the origin of the other fonts as there is little
> information about them (big5 was "provided by students at the University
> of Hong Kong" according to its README; courier, gb, and minitel do not
> contain any information).  The remaining fonts just reuse "subfonts"
> from the other directories.

OK.  Courier is a standard PostScript font (with a free implementation
by the URW++ foundry), so it’s probably fine.  I don’t know about the
others; it’s probably safe, but perhaps you could ask for advice on the
GNU/Linux-libre mailing list?  (See
<https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-linux-libre>.)

>> Note that the page above says that the Lucent PL is incompatible with
>> the GPL.  Are we combining GPL code with Lucent code here?
>
> AFAICT LPL code (libmp libsec) is combined with GPL code when building
> emu.  There is some more LPL code in the os directory, which is only
> needed for building native inferno, and in the appl and module
> directories, which contain Limbo code which is run on inferno but not
> used to build it.
> The NOTICE says that all licenses are compatible with the GPLv2 but that
> is apparently incorrect.
> As I am not very familiar with software licenses I do not know what to
> do about this.  According to the GPL FAQ [*] it is possible to add an
> exception when using incompatible libraries, but I am hesitant to
> suggest this in a bug report to upstream because I do not know if that
> applies here.
>
> Is this a blocker?

What you’re writing about libmp/libsec linked into ‘emu’ sounds like it
could be a GPL violation.  Again, to be sure, I’d suggest getting
feedback from the GNU/Linux-libre mailing list (in a separate thread.)

>> Sounds good.  Note that, if possible, we should stick to the usual file
>> system layout (that is OUT/share, OUT/lib, OUT/bin, etc. and not
>> OUT/usr.)  Though if keeping the /usr/inferno layout style is really
>> important, we can make an exception.
>
> The layout style is not important; I only used OUT/usr/inferno because
> /usr/inferno is the default in mkconfig.  I have changed this to
> OUT/share/inferno, which matches what the Nix package [†] does.

Sounds good.

Thank you!

Ludo’.