[pacman-dev] Couple of questions about libalpm doc, and pacman/copyright

[jjacky]

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:
>
>    http://code.toofishes.net/pacman/doc/

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