Your message dated Thu, 12 Jun 2008 07:10:10 -0600 (MDT)
with message-id <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
and subject line fixed
has caused the Debian Bug report #457589,
regarding sdcc should be in main
to be marked as done.
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If this is not the case it is now your responsibility to reopen the
Bug report if necessary, and/or fix the problem forthwith.
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457589: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=457589
Debian Bug Tracking System
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--- Begin Message ---
Package: sdcc
Version: 2.7.0-1
Severity: serious
This version of sdcc was uploaded to non-free, but the reasoning given in the
changelog appears to be incorrect. Other packages build-depend on sdcc and
are thus signficantly impacted by this mistaken move of the package to
non-free. I believe that the package belongs in main and should be returned
there immediately.
The changelog indicates that it is the license for the assemblers that is in
question. I've just spent some time studying the sources, and see that there
are four architecture subtrees under the as/ directory.
The as/xa51 subtree is copyright Paul Stoffregen and licensed under GPLv2, so
no problem there.
The other three are drived from the same assembler package that apparently
predates sdcc, and carry the copyright of Alan R. Baldwin, with an 'all rights
reserved' clause in the sources. That forces us to look elsewhee, and in
as/doc/asmlnk.doc, we find that the author makes two assertions. The first
is that the programs are placed in the public domain. The second is that
permission is granted for non-commercial use.
While this pair of assertions may perhaps appear contradictory, and if written
today would clearly indicate some confusion on the part of the author, I think
we need to realize that these assertions date from 1995, and the use of the
code in sdcc has stood unchallenged for a long time. Further, the second
assertion does not place any additional restrictions on the first. Therefore,
I think we can and should assume as the sdcc authors apparently have that this
work was truly in the public domain, and thus is completely legitimate to
include in a GPLv2 work.
If you disagree, then there are two reasonable courses of action, neither of
which involves placing the entire sdcc package in non-free. The first is to
attempt to contact the upstream author of the work in question (or ask the
sdcc maintainers to do so) to gain an explicit assertion that his work is ok
to include in a GPL'ed work with no additional restrictions. The second would
be to split the package into 'sdcc' and 'sdcc-nonfree', placing the affected
assemblers in the latter but leaving the compiler and xa51 assembler available
in main.
I see some mention in the changelog of adding html documentation again with
the move to non-free, but see nothing to indicate what the problem is/was.
I don't see any immediate problems in a quick read-through of the documentation
sources?
Bdale
--- End Message ---
--- Begin Message ---
The restructuring of sdcc is complete and there is an sdcc package in main
again. Unfortunately, that does not resolve the gnuradio build problem after
all, but the problem this bug reported is now resolved.
Bdale
--- End Message ---
