Re: [Savannah-users] Yet another gpl license question

[Kaz Kylheku]

On Sat, 14 Jan 2012 10:37:49 -0800 (PST), Joseph Pesco
<address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi Folks;
> 
> I'm almost set to submit a project to Savannah. I'm running it
> through it's paces, and say to myself, "I really need to include
> rcs-5.7-26.i386.rpm in the tar ball. There are several other packages
> I'd also like to include but am not over bloat concerns.

Packaging architecture- and distro-specific binaries in
your project (and of freeware utilities, at that) is a complete
non-starter.

> My project is a "Gnu key chain" utility and thus far rcs is the only
> extraneous package required for it's operation and I plain don't

Why don't you just say "this program depends on rcs;
you must have rcs installed to run this program and it's
tested with rcs 5.7".

For amy GNU/Linux users, this will be as easy as doing
something like "apt-get install rcs".

If your program gets picked up by distros, they will take
care of this. When people install your key-ring through their
package management software, it will pick up rcs as a
dependency.

If you really depend on a particular version of rcs, it may be
best to include the source tarball in your program, and have
build for it, which arrange for it to be installed in some
directory that your program knows about, where it won't conflict
with an existing installation of rcs. If you do it
this way, you can add your own patches to rcs,
too, should you ever need to.