Corinna Vinschen wrote: > On Thu, Jan 24, 2002 at 11:42:16AM -0500, Charles Wilson wrote: > >>Hmmm....this is disquieting. Let's assume that Bob has built, on his >>machine, the "HandyMedicineDatabase" application which depends on >>cygregex.dll. >> >>He can now no longer install HMD on a new machine, unless he carries >>around a copy of the regex package -- or he is forced to recompile his >>app so that it doesn't depend on cygregex.dll. >> > > As far as I understood our licensing model, the HMD application > is either OSS or it's internally used. Either way, Bob has the > sources handy. I don't see a problem.
Sure. But I could *really* piss a lot of people off if I removed libncurses5 and libncurses6 and released libncurses7 instead (and even moreso if I release "empty" libncurses5 and 6 packages to force the deletion of preexisting cygncurses5/6 DLLs). I don't think it's reasonable to assume that ONLY the packages distributed by the cygwin mirror system matter -- even after all "official" packages have migrated to the new cygncurses7.dll, "external" progs still might require cygncurses6/5 for a while. Just because it's possible for Bob to recompile "HMD" doesn't mean that we as maintainers should arbitrarily and needlessly force him to do so. >>Perhaps you can release a new regex package that contains only the DLL, >>and not the development links. However, this brings up the question: >>how long to we need to keep these old DLLs around to support (possible) >>user-compiled packages? >> >>E.g. when can the libreadline4 package be removed? No existing *cygwin* >>package depends on it, but user-compiled stuff might... Ditto >>"cygregex.dll". >> > > I'd think it's your decision for libreadline4. Sure -- and I figure I'll keep it around for about 6 - 9 months. But I'll never release an empty "libreadline4" package -- that's just needless meddling with the user's system. > libregex was always just a workaround. Having regex functionality > in libc (libcygwin) is what most people (and packages) expect. Sure. But Bob previously ported HMD to use -lregex, and now his binary requires cygregex.dll. If he is distributing HMD (with sources, no GPL violations here) now he must immediately "un-port" and recompile -- because new users can't get cygregex.dll anymore. I don't think we should be that dictatorial to folks who distribute derivative (but GPL-compliant) packages that piggyback off of cygwin. To sum up: I think you should release "regex-4.4-3" that only contains /usr/bin/cygregex.dll -- and nothing else. (this guarantees that new packages cannot acquire a dependency on cygregex). And then just let it sit for several months, so that the "Bob's" of the world have a reasonable amount of time to recompile their stuff. --Chuck -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Bug reporting: http://cygwin.com/bugs.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/
