What's up with elfutils?

[Nicholas Miell]

On Sat, 2006-05-27 at 13:43 +0200, Robert Scheck wrote:
> Hello Nicholas,
> 
> On Fr, 26 Mai 2006, Nicholas Miell wrote:
> > A crazy license, no documentation, no web site, no mailing list, no CVS,
> > no real presence besides a RPM, a bugzilla component, and the occasional
> > mention on the SystemTap list.
> 
> did you ever have a look to elfutils-0.120/{AUTHORS,THANKS}? Red Hat is
> upstream for elfutils and developed by Ulrich Drepper and Roland McGrath.
> Both are also glibc developers or even maintainers (see /lib/libc.so.6).
> 

Yes, I am aware of this. Does this mean I email them personally with all
elfutils questions/discussions/patches? Shouldn't that be done on a
public list?

> > Why is this being used instead of the other (more sensibly licensed? I
> > can't tell, I have no idea what the elfutils license means.) libelfs and
> > libdwarfs that are available?
> 
> Huh? Do you have other elfutils than me? GPL and OSL as far as I got from
> the elfutils spec file in Fedora Core and rest seems to be explained after
> reading the comments of elfutils-0.120/libdw/dwarf_attr.c for example.
>  

elfutils is licensed under the GPL for all the tools (which I'm
perfectly OK with), and the GPL and/or something unintelligible for the
libraries. AFAICT, the "something unitelligible" says that it can also
be used by any OSI sufficienty viral OSI license, but I haven't paid a
lawyer to explain it to me.

The choice of GPL and/or viral OSI license for a library that
reimplements a common API used by most (all?) ELF Unixen is strange,
considering that better APIs could probably be developed if portable
application compatibility is not a goal of the project, and that seems
to be the case based on the licensing choice and comments by Mr.
Drepper.

> > And where does one go to get bugs fixed, because I don't think bugzilla
> > is it. (Although, I think this may be a bugzilla privileges issue.)
> 
> Whenever Red Hat is upstream, Bugzilla is the used bugtracking tool. Sorry,
> that I'm not really able to get your problem...

This is being discussed elsewhere in this thread, so I'm not going to
repeat myself here.

-- 
Nicholas Miell <nmiell at comcast.net>