Re: Tools for eCos 2.0

[Christopher Faylor <cgf@redhat.com>]

[Reply-To set to overseers]
On Wed, Feb 19, 2003 at 08:52:42PM +0000, Jonathan Larmour wrote:
>One of the things the eCos project needs for our upcoming release are
>prebuilt GNU tools for some of our primary targets. The burden of having
>to build tools, especially for windows users, can be quite large. Our
>users are embedded developers, not GNU enthusiasts per se!
>[snip]
>However eCos is big enough already (16Mb even in .tar.bz2 form!), and
>these tools will no doubt be popular - at least one tools download per
>eCos download.
>[snip]
>Anyway, I just wanted to run this by overseers to check for any comments. 
>Obviously if people think this is overkill and just allowing unrestricted 
>downloads would be fine, then we're not going to object :-).

Cygwin disallows direct downloads from sources.redhat.com, relying on
mirrors to handle this.  Without this restriction cygwin would probably
consume a significant portion of the bandwidth of sources.redhat.com.

I don't think there is any reason why eCos should be taking up a
disproportionate amount of bandwidth if, as you suspect, it will be
popular.  So we may decide to enforce the mirrors-only rule here.

I'm not sure that I understand the argument of users not being "GNU
enthusiasts".  Since you are targeting a technical audience, I don't see
why this is an issue.

I assume that you will be dealing with the GPL issues.  You will be
providing sources for all of the binaries you produce, right?  Are the
sources included in your disk space estimate?

On a more personal note, if you are going to be providing binaries that
duplicate anything that is already available in a cygwin release then I
would strongly object to that.

Finally, if you are using this in any way as a distribution method for a
commercial venture then I think it is not appropriate for
sources.redhat.com.

cgf