Re: Packaging software built with cygwin

[Jay Maynard <jmaynard at conmicro dot cx>]

On Wed, Feb 05, 2003 at 12:55:43PM -0500, Christopher Faylor wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 05, 2003 at 11:18:22AM -0600, Jay Maynard wrote:
> >It may be intended to be upward compatible, but that's not our experience.
> Ok.  I'm not going to start scouring random other mailing lists for
> cygwin bug reports so I suppose this situation will continue In absence
> of any details, it's fruitless to carry this discussion any further.

Fine by me; it's been over the past year or so, as well, so bug reports at
this point will be of limited use. However, are you saying that if we
encounter problems with Hercules 2.17 (built against Cygwin 1.3.19) running
with, say, Cygwin 1.3.22, you'll take a bug report on that and fix the
problem?

BTW, I'm not the only one to have this problem; there's a message on the
Hercules list that was posted in reply to my announcement that I would no
longer distribute the DLLs saying that his company got away from Cygwin for
exactly that reason. (I'll forward it, if you like.)

> Hmm.  Looks like you just couldn't resist, huh?

No, I couldn't.

> The source tarball for cygwin is 4.6M.  I don't understand why this
> is a huge hardship but, frankly, I don't really care.

4.6 MB times how many versions will I need to keep around? Before I removed
them from the Hercules site, I had four sets of the Cygwin DLLs,
corresponding to four versions of Hercules they were needed for. Every time
I release a new version of Hercules, that's another source tarball I'd need.

Further, is that tarball guaranteed to satisfy the requirement to distribute
the source code for that version? Is everything that's needed in that one
tarball? If so, can I get that in writing, so that if someone comes along
later and alleges a GPL violation, I can say, "No, Red Hat says that
distributing this tarball is sufficient."? Otherwise, I'd have to keep
around the entire Cygwin source, just to make sure I included everything
that was necessary. I'm sure that's more than 4.6 MB.

> A setup.ini with just the cygwin DLL in it seems pretty simple.

True. OTOH, when setup.exe changes, the format of that file is subject to
change (see Igor's warning in the message where he first suggested that). I
can insulate myself from that by distributing setup.exe, but then I'm back
in the same boat of making sure that I distribute the source code that's
used to generate it.

> Btw, perhaps it is not your intention, but I catch a whiff of innuendo
> here makes me wonder if you're really asking for help or just here to
> make some statements.

I'm looking for a way to make it simple for Hercules users to install the
needed support for the Cygwin version without violating any licenses,
without having to keep multiple megabytes of multiple versions of source
code around that nobody will ever download, and without making them install
multiple megabytes of Cygwin environment they have no interest in using.

It's no secret that I've opposed the GPL for many years. (I invented the
term GPV in 1989.) However, I'm stuck with it, so I'm trying to do what I
need done without violating it. That doesn't mean I have to like it.

> Supporting other people's distributions is not a core focus of
> setup.exe.  However, if this is important to you it should be pretty
> easy for you to submit patches to do what you want.

I'll take a look in my copious free time.

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