Markus Wanner wrote:
Anybody realized that this Debian bug (and several others) got closed in
the mean time (Sunday)?  According to the changelog [1], Martin Pitt
(which I'm CC'ing here, as he might not be aware of this thread, yet)
worked around this issue by pre-loading readline via LD_PRELOAD for psql.

Personally, I'm a bit suspicious about that solution (technically as
well as from a licensing perspective), but it's probably the simplest
way to let only psql link against readline.

This originated in http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=608442 , and from what I'm reading there it sounds like Martin is inserting this as a workaround but it hasn't passed through Debian Legal yet. I would expect them to reject this as unacceptable. Dynamic linking via LD_PRELOAD is still linking, even if it happens at runtime. I commend Martin for buying some time here by doing that, but this doesn't change the urgency to come up with an alternate solution much to me. As I see it, that change could be reverted at any time via pushback from legal.

As far as working around this by releasing our own packages goes, that's useful, but I'd also characterize that as only a workaround rather than a real solution. OpenSSL is open-source, but it's not "free software" via that standards of the FSF, which I feel is a completely reasonable position given the license. When you depend on a software stack built from unambiguously free software, having components that aren't you've wedged in there and are dependent on is never a good idea. I won't consider this truly resolved until GnuTLS support for PostgreSQL is in core.

--
Greg Smith   2ndQuadrant US    g...@2ndquadrant.com   Baltimore, MD
PostgreSQL Training, Services, and 24x7 Support  www.2ndQuadrant.us
"PostgreSQL 9.0 High Performance": http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/books


--
Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org)
To make changes to your subscription:
http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers

Reply via email to