[arch-dev-public] GPL Compliance: A beginning

[Aaron Griffin]

On Wed, May 21, 2008 at 4:16 PM, Jan de Groot <jan at jgc.homeip.net> wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-05-21 at 15:49 -0500, Aaron Griffin wrote:
>> So, yeah people are blowing smoke about this hosting the sources
>> thing. That's fine, it's a legit violation...
>>
>> I made a little script which should generate some of these things...
>> I'm testing it now, as it's not fully "live" just yet:
>> http://dev.archlinux.org/~aaron/sources/
>>
>> Here's something neat which is an added bonus: any one of these things
>> can be used to build the entire package when offline. Download the
>> src.tar.gz, extract, and makepkg.
>>
>> One big lingering issue: do we need different source tarballs for each
>> arch? My instincts tell me yes, for a few reasons:
>> * I recall some PKGBUILDs having CARCH based 'if's around the sources
>> * Some packages are only in one arch or another
>>
>> Does anyone know of a way to solve this... I don't want to bloat the
>> disk usage for a few special cases? mayeb md5sum and symlink?
>
> I don't see the need for per-arch source tarballs. Sure, there's
> inconsistency between architectures (epiphany 2.22.0 in i686 vs 2.22.2.1
> in x86_64 for example), but that would mean two source packages, as we
> have two different binary packages. The script could omit the
> architecture and only create a package for amd64 if there isn't exactly
> the same package for i686 already.
>
> The only packages I know that have checks for CARCH around sources are
> swt (which is not GPL anyways) and some binary non-free things that are
> built for a specific architecture. As these binary blobs aren't GPL
> either (and redistribution rules are questionable), I guess we won't see
> this much around.

Ok, I will modify that then and remove the CARCH from the filename.

Another thing - I am not checking licenses. I figured it's not a bad
idea to just do it for everything. In the grand scheme of things, the
amount of non-GPL packages is probably small, and it's not really a
BAD idea to make extras. /me shrugs

However, now that you mentioned swt, it brings up a good point. We
can't do this for things like flashplugin just yet. So, should I
create some sort of list of packages to NEVER generate sources for?