Mail Archives: cygwin/2002/01/24/17:02:06
Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 24, 2002 at 11:42:16AM -0500, Charles Wilson wrote:
>
>>Hmmm....this is disquieting. Let's assume that Bob has built, on his
>>machine, the "HandyMedicineDatabase" application which depends on
>>cygregex.dll.
>>
>>He can now no longer install HMD on a new machine, unless he carries
>>around a copy of the regex package -- or he is forced to recompile his
>>app so that it doesn't depend on cygregex.dll.
>>
>
> As far as I understood our licensing model, the HMD application
> is either OSS or it's internally used. Either way, Bob has the
> sources handy. I don't see a problem.
Sure. But I could *really* piss a lot of people off if I removed
libncurses5 and libncurses6 and released libncurses7 instead (and even
moreso if I release "empty" libncurses5 and 6 packages to force the
deletion of preexisting cygncurses5/6 DLLs).
I don't think it's reasonable to assume that ONLY the packages
distributed by the cygwin mirror system matter -- even after all
"official" packages have migrated to the new cygncurses7.dll, "external"
progs still might require cygncurses6/5 for a while.
Just because it's possible for Bob to recompile "HMD" doesn't mean that
we as maintainers should arbitrarily and needlessly force him to do so.
>>Perhaps you can release a new regex package that contains only the DLL,
>>and not the development links. However, this brings up the question:
>>how long to we need to keep these old DLLs around to support (possible)
>>user-compiled packages?
>>
>>E.g. when can the libreadline4 package be removed? No existing *cygwin*
>>package depends on it, but user-compiled stuff might... Ditto
>>"cygregex.dll".
>>
>
> I'd think it's your decision for libreadline4.
Sure -- and I figure I'll keep it around for about 6 - 9 months. But
I'll never release an empty "libreadline4" package -- that's just
needless meddling with the user's system.
> libregex was always just a workaround. Having regex functionality
> in libc (libcygwin) is what most people (and packages) expect.
Sure. But Bob previously ported HMD to use -lregex, and now his binary
requires cygregex.dll. If he is distributing HMD (with sources, no GPL
violations here) now he must immediately "un-port" and recompile --
because new users can't get cygregex.dll anymore. I don't think we
should be that dictatorial to folks who distribute derivative (but
GPL-compliant) packages that piggyback off of cygwin.
To sum up: I think you should release "regex-4.4-3" that only contains
/usr/bin/cygregex.dll -- and nothing else. (this guarantees that new
packages cannot acquire a dependency on cygregex). And then just let it
sit for several months, so that the "Bob's" of the world have a
reasonable amount of time to recompile their stuff.
--Chuck
--
Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
Bug reporting: http://cygwin.com/bugs.html
Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html
FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/
- Raw text -