Packaging freedos, its GPL but no tools to compile?

[Hans de Goede]

Jeff Spaleta wrote:
> On 1/17/06, Hans de Goede <j.w.r.degoede at hhs.nl> wrote:
>> What you're saying now is, as long as it is not a native linux binary,
>> license / freedom doesn't matter anymore as long as its distributable.
> 
> If its not linux native and If you can get it to compile under fedora
> using the cross-compiling tools which are available great... if you
> can't.. then its a case by case basis.
> 
> My question to you is, how do you plan to maintain freedos?   Since
> you can't use the normal fedora buildsystem to incorporate patches..
> whats you plan as the maintainer if functionality problems arise?
> 

Upstream, upstream and upstream. My knowledge of (free)dos internals is 
a limit approaching 0. So far upstream is very cooperative and 
responsive. For example dosemu is GPL with an exception for some files 
in the src tree which have an X11 like license. Some files however 
lacked a copyright header und thus one couldn't tell if they we're GPL 
or had their own license which falls under the exception. I asked them 
to clearify and in dosemu CVS it is now clearified.

Also dosemu crashed on x86_64 unless I added noexec=off the the 
kernelcmdline, they fixed this in 1 day.

> If freedos is viewed as dosemu content, then I could certainly make
> the argument that its like game levels for a game and is permissible
> content. 
 >

I wouldn't want to see the definition of content streched this way 
myself. I would rather see this as a special case where we have a 
GPL-app for which we lack the compile chain (and it is impossible to get 
the compile chain into FE because of license issues).

The exception in this case would be handled by putting both the source 
and the bin tarbal as provided by upstream in the SRPM, and during build 
just extract the bins. Since upstream claims that those bins where build 
from those sources using the included instruction and since upstream is 
the one giving the license, I think that would fully satisfy our GPL 
obligations.

> But I would not be particularly thrilled to see that
> definition of permissible content extented to allow a collection dos
> executable software sitting in the fedora tree that works on top of
> the freedos kernel. I think we have to be reasonable and limit what
> fedora provides to what is required to get a minimal dos environment
> and let users pull additional dos executables from sources other than
> Fedora.
>

Actually (going offtopic a bit) I was thinking about maybe packaging 
some other interesting _open source_ dos software to run on top of 
dosemu+freedos and/or dosbox / bochs / qemu. There seems to be quite a 
bit of opensource dos software these days.

I do however agree that doing so is questionable, does this really 
belong in FE? Doing so under the contentrules is IMHO a plain no-no, 
most of this software is build using djgpp which can be compiled under 
Linux as a crosscompiler, so if we (I) do this I want to really build 
the packages.

Then again I might port some of it to native Linux, that is how I 
started as a Linux developer porting opensource dos software to Linux,
depending on the app the amount of work could be not much more then 
doing it under an emulator.

Regards,

Hans