On 01/09/12 19:28, Dave Reisner wrote:
On Mon, Jan 09, 2012 at 07:09:12PM +0100, jjacky wrote:
Hey there,
So I've been working on a little app using libalpm, and I have a couple of questions. Hopefully it's okay to ask this here.
First off, a quick question regarding the doc. Looking at the source code i see functions are nicely commented, but all I could find as documentation was this man page: https://www.archlinux.org/pacman/libalpm.3.html Since it's totally possible, did I actually miss something (obvious), or are there no (generated) doc publicly available?
It's available, and it's religiously updated by Dan for git master:
oh, nice! Thanks.
It's certainly not a problem, especially since I find the libalpm/pacman source code to be really clean/easy to read/follow; It's quite simple to figure out how things work and how to use them, so congratulations on that, great work. (I wish my code looked as nice.)
There's some places where it's not so nice, too ;)
But while I read pacman's code a lot to see how things are done, I happen to actually also full copy/paste stuff in my app, including complete functions (e.g. the whole parsing of the config file, strtrim(), humanize_size(), etc).
So I wonder, what's the right thing to do when it comes to this, and copyright? I should probably mention that I'm very new at all this, so I'm not sure, for instance, what should be included in the source files of my app, on its copyright/version message, etc
Sure. You can check out some of the code that we've borrowed from other projects -- PolarSSL, libcurl, RPM. Basically, it's set aside in a separate .c file and includes a header from libalpm to carry protos. The foreign project's copyright goes at the top of the .c with a note about any possible modifications we've made.
Okay, thanks; I'll check that then, and try & make sure to include proper copyright notices in my .c files as well.
I'll release my stuff on GPL3+, and I believe pacman is GPL2+, so based on what I read it's compatible/allowed, I just wonder what's the proper way to do it. Like, should I include something like this: Copyright (C) 2012 Pacman Development Team
Yes, we use GPL2. I'm personally not a fan of how strict GPL3 is, and personally choose to use MIT/ISC for my projects. IANAL, but I believe you are correct -- a GPL3 project can include GPL2 source as long as it retains the copyright notice.
Lastly, while doing all this I came up with 2 (very) minor patches for pacman, so I'll share those. But I'm guessing it would be better as separate emails/threads, so I'll do it that way.
Thanks, dave
-j