On Tue, 18 Nov 2014, Bruno Félix Rezende Ribeiro wrote:
Hello Steven! Em Mon, 17 Nov 2014 23:54:43 -0800 Steven Edwards <winehac...@gmail.com> escreveu:I couldn't find any information on if anyone else is working on either of these but I've started hacking on it in my local tree and am making pretty good progress.I sent a message a few days ago to this very mailing list expressing my desire of migrating CDE's build system to GNU Autotools[0]. Unfortunately, CDE developers don't seem very receptive to this idea.
Sorry I didn't respond sooner, been kind of busy :) I have no objection to supporting autotool builds for CDE (but we need to not break or remove Imake support either).
I'm not the first one looking for this, however. Oleksiy has contributed a significant amount of code for this end long before I came to the scene[1]. His lengthy patch and the discussion around it was just plainly ignored to the death of his helpful initiative.
No it wasn't... Keep in mind that most (if not all of us) have day jobs that will always take precendence. My main concern was with licensing. Especially GPL3. Now CDE is an open source project, but we would *really* like to avoid being forced into a specific license if at all possible - this is why we request MIT licensing. If some of the autotool scripts are not MIT, I think we can live with that. If the GNU folks want to whine about it, we can remove it, or make it optional. I can't see us getting sued for it. I am definitely in favor of making the building of CDE more robust and adaptive.
On Sourceforge there are 8 forks of CDE's VCS code, but none of them implements Oleksiy changes, or any other in the direction of GNU Autotools. Even if a patch for this end was accepted by the main developers, they would still require Imake build system to be working in parallel (imagine the mess), dragging the development of a efficient, stable and standard build system.
Why would this need to be the case? What mess are you imagining?
Furthermore, they require any contribution to be under a permissive license, and I don't feel comfortable with that, because to me copyleft is an achievement we should not give up without a very compelling reason, for the benefit of user's freedom. Therefore, I'm afraid there is no other reasonable way of getting the build system migrated seamlessly if not by a fork.
Huh? What's wrong with a permissive license? It would be nice someday to re-license CDE as MIT, like X11. Can't get any more permissive than that. But -- I do not get to choose the license. It's LGPL by decision of The Open Group who owns CDE.
I'm very interested in this and I'm considering the possibility of making a fork of CDE for the GNU project, so it can be one of the official desktops of the GNU's project distribution of the GNU system[3] that, coincidently, had a release today. I'm thinking about naming it "GDE", which stands for "GNU Desktop Environment". The first step is to migrate CDE's code to GNU Savannah[4]. Then we can say good bye to the bloated and awful Sourceforge web interface and its commercial appeal[5].
I haven't had any problems with it.
CDE's original project could still fill the niche of supporting ancient proprietary unices, with its ancient build system and worries about retro-compatibility for an undefined amount of time, eventually and deliberately letting some self-interested people or corporation take away CDE's users freedom; the freedom that take so much time and efforts to achieve!
Again, huh? Exactly what freedom(s) are you giving up here? Why can't an autotools system co-exist with Imake?
We just doesn't have to follow that path! We can do better: the GNU way! :-) What do you think? Don't you want to contribute to this effort even further?
We like contributions. We aren't interested in ideology though, at least I'm not. Feel free to work on autotools support, and supply clean patches -- just make sure it does not break the current build system. I know Imake is ancient and sucky, but it's what we have today. And despite it's suckiness, it does work. X11 and Motif have moved to an autotools-based system, I do not see why we can't either. But I also see no reason to dump Imake (yet). This isn't an either-or situation. Also, if you fork, you are still bound by the same licening issues we are. -jon
Footnotes: [0] http://sourceforge.net/p/cdesktopenv/mailman/message/33045815/ [1] http://sourceforge.net/p/cdesktopenv/mailman/message/30437899/ [3] http://www.gnu.org/software/guix [4] http://savannah.gnu.org/ [5] If you have received this mail through the mailing list look at its footer: comercial advertising! How can developers tolerate this behavior in every corner of their development facilities?
Well, we get a free platform for development... I don't read the ads attached to mailing list messages. Do you? Is the real issue here that we request contributions be MIT? Is that the crux of your complaint? -- Jon Trulson "Don't believe everything you read on the internet." --Abraham Lincoln
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