Re: license alteration for chown/lchown

[Bruno Haible]

Hi Eric,

> >     Module          Source file             Contributors
> >     ------          -----------             ------------
> > 
> >     chown           lib/chown.c             Eric Blake
> > 
> >     lchown          lib/lchown.c            Eric Blake
> > 
> >     open            lib/open.c              Eric Blake, Bruno Haible
> 
> How did you come up with this list?

I did it manually, in three steps:
  1) Collect all dependencies of the given module(s), ignoring those that
     are already under the desired license.
  2) Look up all source files, from the module descriptions, ignoring the
     m4/* files and doc/* files that are under different licenses (see
     <http://www.gnu.org/software/gnulib/manual/html_node/Copyright.html>).
  3) For each of these source files, look at the changes since the
     copyright switch from GPLv2+ to GPLv3+ and from LGPLv2+ to LGPLv3+,
     which happened on 2007-10-07 (see
     <http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnulib/2007-10/msg00100.html>).
     For the changes older than this date on LGPLed files, we promised to
     go back to LGPLv2+ upon request (see
     <http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnulib/2007-07/msg00155.html>,
     <http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnulib/2007-07/msg00168.html>).

> Or more generally, what's the 
> easiest way to check whether a list of modules meets a certain license
> restriction?  I know that --lgpl=2 works when using --import into an
> existing project

Yes, this is the way to check it. gnulib-tool lines 3686..3720 is part
of 'gnulib-tool --import'.

> but it didn't seem to do a thing when I tried: 
> 
> $ ./gnulib-tool --with-tests --create-testdir --dir=testdir1 --lgpl=2 lchown
> 
> I was expecting that to abort with a complaint about incompatible modules.

If you think 'gnulib-tool --create-testdir' should have this functionality,
please propose a patch to gnulib-tool.

Bruno