Don, el 26 de agosto a las 17:19 me escribiste: > Leandro Lucarella wrote: > >Don, el 26 de agosto a las 09:37 me escribiste: > >>I have a copy of Walter's internal DMD test suite, so I could actually > >What was the reason not to release the test suite? Copyright? > > Yes. > > >Because Walter has claimed frequently that the submitted patches are not > >well tested. It would be a huge help for people contributing patches to > >have the "official" test suite to be sure their patches would be accepted. > > Yes, though you don't need the test suite, just the results. You just > need to know: "that passed all tests" or "here are test cases which it > fails".
That would improve the situation, but not being able to see what's in the test case that failed could be a little.... frustrating. And it would require some sort of public "testing" facility where people can test their patches, with could be a little.... hard to implement =) > It still doesn't guarantee that the patch will be accepted, > though -- Walter may decide the patch fixes the problem at the wrong > place. Sure. What I meant is that a patch that doesn't pass all the test cases will never be accepted, while one that passes them has a chance. > >>test all of the patches and be 'patchmeister'(I'm currently responsible > >>for more than half the patches, anyway). Maybe we could have > >>a 'patchdmd' branch in the repository, which I would have write access > >>to, maybe that would make it easier for Walter to incorporate patches > >>(it'd be particularly valuable for DMD1, I think). But the last thing > >>I'd want to do is make a fork of DMD. > >And you know what? Even if you want, you can't (without Walter permission, > >of course)... > > Walter's permission is an obvious condition. BTW, that's untrue, anyway: the > front-end is GPLed, so a patched front-end can certainly be redistributed. > But > it'd just be a service to Walter anyway. Sure, you can also grab the LDC frontend if you want a DMDFE with some extra patches, but that's not the point. The point is you *can't* do a 'patchdmd' without permission. And as far as licencing goes, I really can't understand how Walter can give anyone rights to redistribute a (modified) BE, if he is not the one owner of the code. If he is, he can make it free/libre, if he is not, he can't give arbitrary permission to people. So the licensing/copyright issue seems a little weird for me. But the, IANAL. > >Then people ask why it's important that DMD is *really* free/libre. > > I'm one of those people, and I still don't see how it makes any > practical difference. The backend is extremely useful for compiler > development, but it's not significant in the long-term development of > the language. I don't think a 32-bit only backend will be very valuable > in 5-10 years time. Ok, you have a point here, seeing the DMD BE merely as a personal tool for doing FE development might have sense. But it's really a little weird. That's not how free/open source development usually works. I'm not saying it *can't* work, but it will be certainly harder to find people willing to work that way... -- Leandro Lucarella (luca) | Blog colectivo: http://www.mazziblog.com.ar/blog/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- GPG Key: 5F5A8D05 (F8CD F9A7 BF00 5431 4145 104C 949E BFB6 5F5A 8D05) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- El otro día tenía un plan Pero después me olvidé y me comí un flan
