On Tuesday 27 March 2007 11:48, Simon Marlow wrote: > We distribute gcc not just for its CPP support, but also because GHC still > supports compilation via C, and because GHC can be used as a front-end to > the C compiler. I'd happily swap a dependency on gcc for one on cpphs, but > that's not an option at the moment (it might be if we drop via-C support, > though).
I am not very radical about licenses, but a lot of distros are, so the problem still remains: cpphs' LGPL (why the initial "L" for a program, BTW?) is incompatible with Hugs' and GHC's BSD-like license, so no distribution will ever ship them as a unit (RPM etc.). This is one of the reasons I'd like to have all tools available separately. If I see this correctly, Hugs source distributions would contain Hugs souces (BSD) *and* cpphs (LGPL), and this is a no-no for distros with a strong lawyer behind. I think that we remove this dependency and revert to C's cpp again for Hugs, otherwise I'm a bit clueless regarding how to solve this issue. :-( nhc98 can ship cpphs in its sources for bootstrapping purposes, but it should not install it. cpphs should be visible to the user only via a separate package. This can and should be installable separately, but none of the Haskell implementations depend on it for bootstrapping. Just to repeat: I am not a BSD/LGPL/GPL/whatever evangelist and personally I don't care very much which open license is used, but mixing licenses has become an issue for distros, and we shouldn't make it hard/impossible to ship Haskell on the next Fedora/openSUSE/Debian/... DVD. Cheers, S. _______________________________________________ Cvs-ghc mailing list [email protected] http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/cvs-ghc
