Re: Packaging software built with cygwin

[Ronald Landheer-Cieslak <ronald at landheer dot com>]

The way I read GPL (but please correct me if I'm wrong) you should be able 
to write a fork off the current Setup that installs the Hercules and gets 
the Cygwin from one of the mirrors (of which you can download the list at 
the time of installing from cygwin.com). Technically, you would not be 
distributing Cygwin (because you would be using Red Hat's own 
distribution) but the effect would be the same.

Your remaining problem would be that Cygwin is a "moving target" as you
say, but Cygwin doesn't move all *that* quickly either, does it? I mean,
you don't build Hercules against the latest snapshot do you? Of course, I
have no idea how extensively you use the Cygwin API but my (arguably
little, juding by the size of my projects vs yours) experience has always 
been that if you stick to POSIX compliance, Cygwin does the job quite 
nicely (and patches to Cygwin are usually welcome in case of error, 
provided you have a copyright waiver which I don't have).

As for GPL rants: I'd be interested (off-list) in hearing your reasons for 
being against GPL, and even more in what alternatives you would propose.

Greetz!

rlc

On Wed, 5 Feb 2003, Jay Maynard wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 05, 2003 at 12:55:43PM -0500, Christopher Faylor wrote:
> > On Wed, Feb 05, 2003 at 11:18:22AM -0600, Jay Maynard wrote:
> > >It may be intended to be upward compatible, but that's not our experience.
> > Ok.  I'm not going to start scouring random other mailing lists for
> > cygwin bug reports so I suppose this situation will continue In absence
> > of any details, it's fruitless to carry this discussion any further.
> 
> Fine by me; it's been over the past year or so, as well, so bug reports at
> this point will be of limited use. However, are you saying that if we
> encounter problems with Hercules 2.17 (built against Cygwin 1.3.19) running
> with, say, Cygwin 1.3.22, you'll take a bug report on that and fix the
> problem?
> 
> BTW, I'm not the only one to have this problem; there's a message on the
> Hercules list that was posted in reply to my announcement that I would no
> longer distribute the DLLs saying that his company got away from Cygwin for
> exactly that reason. (I'll forward it, if you like.)
> 
> > Hmm.  Looks like you just couldn't resist, huh?
> 
> No, I couldn't.
> 
> > The source tarball for cygwin is 4.6M.  I don't understand why this
> > is a huge hardship but, frankly, I don't really care.
> 
> 4.6 MB times how many versions will I need to keep around? Before I removed
> them from the Hercules site, I had four sets of the Cygwin DLLs,
> corresponding to four versions of Hercules they were needed for. Every time
> I release a new version of Hercules, that's another source tarball I'd need.
> 
> Further, is that tarball guaranteed to satisfy the requirement to distribute
> the source code for that version? Is everything that's needed in that one
> tarball? If so, can I get that in writing, so that if someone comes along
> later and alleges a GPL violation, I can say, "No, Red Hat says that
> distributing this tarball is sufficient."? Otherwise, I'd have to keep
> around the entire Cygwin source, just to make sure I included everything
> that was necessary. I'm sure that's more than 4.6 MB.
> 
> > A setup.ini with just the cygwin DLL in it seems pretty simple.
> 
> True. OTOH, when setup.exe changes, the format of that file is subject to
> change (see Igor's warning in the message where he first suggested that). I
> can insulate myself from that by distributing setup.exe, but then I'm back
> in the same boat of making sure that I distribute the source code that's
> used to generate it.
> 
> > Btw, perhaps it is not your intention, but I catch a whiff of innuendo
> > here makes me wonder if you're really asking for help or just here to
> > make some statements.
> 
> I'm looking for a way to make it simple for Hercules users to install the
> needed support for the Cygwin version without violating any licenses,
> without having to keep multiple megabytes of multiple versions of source
> code around that nobody will ever download, and without making them install
> multiple megabytes of Cygwin environment they have no interest in using.
> 
> It's no secret that I've opposed the GPL for many years. (I invented the
> term GPV in 1989.) However, I'm stuck with it, so I'm trying to do what I
> need done without violating it. That doesn't mean I have to like it.
> 
> > Supporting other people's distributions is not a core focus of
> > setup.exe.  However, if this is important to you it should be pretty
> > easy for you to submit patches to do what you want.
> 
> I'll take a look in my copious free time.
> 
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