Re: Packaging Inferno

[Diego Nicola Barbato]

Hello Ludo,

I have sent a patch incorporating most of your feedback to
address@hidden (bug#33080).

address@hidden (Ludovic Courtès) writes:

> Hi Diego,
>
> Sorry for the delay!

No problem (my replies are not quite instantaneous either).

> Diego Nicola Barbato <address@hidden> skribis:
>
>> Nils Gillmann <address@hidden> writes:
>>
>>> Ludovic Courtès transcribed 1.9K bytes:
>>>> Hello Diego,
>>>> 
>>>> Diego Nicola Barbato <address@hidden> skribis:

[...snip...]

>>>> thing to do.  As for trademarks, please see
>>>> <https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-system-distribution-guidelines.html#trademarks>
>>>> to determine whether there’s a problem at all.
>>
>> @Ludo:  Judging from the link there seems to be no problem with the
>> trademarks after all.  The bundled fonts (the ones I did not remove),
>> however, are provided in a format native to Inferno (and Plan 9) and can
>> not be rebuilt from source, which might be a problem according to this
>> [2] thread.
>
> Sometimes TTF files are considered source, so it really depends.  Unless
> there’s evidence that there exists another source for these fonts, I’d
> say we can assume it’s fine, possibly with a comment.

I have found no evidence that there exists another source.

> Do you know whether other FSDG distros and Debian provide these fonts?

They do not provide these exact fonts but those from which some of these
are derived (misc and jis are "based" on X fonts, vera is probably based
on Bitstream Vera).
It is harder to find the origin of the other fonts as there is little
information about them (big5 was "provided by students at the University
of Hong Kong" according to its README; courier, gb, and minitel do not
contain any information).  The remaining fonts just reuse "subfonts"
from the other directories.

>>>> Could you also check whether all the code is GPLv2+ like the ‘license’
>>>> field suggests?
>>
>> @Ludo:  According to the NOTICE files scattered through the source tree
>> and the Inferno home page [3] different parts of Inferno are licensed
>> under GPLv2+, LGPLv2+, Expat (MIT-template), Lucent Public License 1.02
>> and Freetype.
>> Am I right to assume that I have to mention all of them in the ‘license’
>> field even though the NOTICE in the root of the source tree [4] says
>> that the "collection" is governed by the GPLv2+?  
>
> Yes, but you can leave a comment explaining that the combined work is
> effectively GPLv2+.
>
>> I could not find the Lucent Public License [5] in the (guix licenses)
>> module.  Should I add it or should I use ‘non-copyleft’?
>
> You can use ‘non-copyleft’ in that case, with a reference to
> <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#lucent102>.
>
> Note that the page above says that the Lucent PL is incompatible with
> the GPL.  Are we combining GPL code with Lucent code here?

AFAICT LPL code (libmp libsec) is combined with GPL code when building
emu.  There is some more LPL code in the os directory, which is only
needed for building native inferno, and in the appl and module
directories, which contain Limbo code which is run on inferno but not
used to build it.
The NOTICE says that all licenses are compatible with the GPLv2 but that
is apparently incorrect.
As I am not very familiar with software licenses I do not know what to
do about this.  According to the GPL FAQ [*] it is possible to add an
exception when using incompatible libraries, but I am hesitant to
suggest this in a bug report to upstream because I do not know if that
applies here.

Is this a blocker?

>>>> Do I get it right that the build result is a script that launches
>>>> Inferno as a GNU/Linux process?  It seems like it could be useful.
>>
>> @Ludo: That is right.  I got the script from here [6].  It starts the
>> window manager and logs in as the current user; it is supposed to
>> provide a convenient entry point to start exploring the system.
>> Alongside this script in %out/bin/ there is also a symlink to the emu
>> binary which is installed by ‘mk install’ under
>> %out/usr/inferno/Linux/386/bin/ (Linux/arm/bin on arm machines).  This
>> directory contains several other executables.  I am considering making
>> some of them (like the Limbo compiler) available under %out/bin in the
>> same way as emu. 
>
> Sounds good.  Note that, if possible, we should stick to the usual file
> system layout (that is OUT/share, OUT/lib, OUT/bin, etc. and not
> OUT/usr.)  Though if keeping the /usr/inferno layout style is really
> important, we can make an exception.

The layout style is not important; I only used OUT/usr/inferno because
/usr/inferno is the default in mkconfig.  I have changed this to
OUT/share/inferno, which matches what the Nix package [†] does.

[...snip...]

> Thanks for your reply!
>
> Ludo’.

Thanks for the feedback!

Diego

[*]: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLIncompatibleLibs
[†]: 
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/applications/inferno/default.nix