Re: Packaging software built with cygwin

[Jay Maynard <jmaynard@conmicro.cx>]

On Thu, Feb 06, 2003 at 10:34:36AM +0100, Ronald Landheer-Cieslak wrote:
> 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.

I've got no philosophical problems with submitting changes to setup.exe to
the maintainers for inclusion in the distributed program. My only interest
in all of this in the first place is to enable users to easily install
Hercules; I'm not, and have no intention of becoming, a Cygwin developer.

> 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?

Hercules is built against the latest production release of Cygwin at the
time it is released. That version has changed from 1.3.10 to 1.3.19 in the
time between the last two releases of Hercules (2.16.5, released on 8 July
2002, and 2.17, released on 1 February 2003). That counts as a moving
target. In general, Hercules major releases happen every 6 to 9 months.

> 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).

Cygwin does the job well enough, or else we wouldn't be having this
discussion. Were it not for inter-version incompatibilities, I'd pick a
version of the DLLs to use, keep one source tarball (and a copy of the email
saying that was sufficient to meet the demands of GPL compliance) around,
and be done with it. Unfortunately, that's not the way it has proven to
work.

> 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.

Sent.

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