On 01/09/12 19:28, Dave Reisner wrote:
On Mon, Jan 09, 2012 at 07:09:12PM +0100, jjacky wrote:
Hey there,
So I've been working on a little app using libalpm, and I have a
couple of questions. Hopefully it's okay to ask this here.
First off, a quick question regarding the doc. Looking at the source
code i see functions are nicely commented, but all I could find as
documentation was this man page:
https://www.archlinux.org/pacman/libalpm.3.html
Since it's totally possible, did I actually miss something
(obvious), or are there no (generated) doc publicly available?
It's available, and it's religiously updated by Dan for git master:
http://code.toofishes.net/pacman/doc/
oh, nice! Thanks.
It's certainly not a problem, especially since I find the
libalpm/pacman source code to be really clean/easy to read/follow;
It's quite simple to figure out how things work and how to use them,
so congratulations on that, great work. (I wish my code looked as
nice.)
There's some places where it's not so nice, too ;)
But while I read pacman's code a lot to see how things are done, I
happen to actually also full copy/paste stuff in my app, including
complete functions (e.g. the whole parsing of the config file,
strtrim(), humanize_size(), etc).
So I wonder, what's the right thing to do when it comes to this, and
copyright? I should probably mention that I'm very new at all this,
so I'm not sure, for instance, what should be included in the source
files of my app, on its copyright/version message, etc
Sure. You can check out some of the code that we've borrowed from other
projects -- PolarSSL, libcurl, RPM. Basically, it's set aside in a
separate .c file and includes a header from libalpm to carry protos. The
foreign project's copyright goes at the top of the .c with a note about
any possible modifications we've made.
Okay, thanks; I'll check that then, and try & make sure to include
proper copyright notices in my .c files as well.
I'll release my stuff on GPL3+, and I believe pacman is GPL2+, so
based on what I read it's compatible/allowed, I just wonder what's
the proper way to do it. Like, should I include something like this:
Copyright (C) 2012 Pacman Development Team
Yes, we use GPL2. I'm personally not a fan of how strict GPL3 is, and
personally choose to use MIT/ISC for my projects. IANAL, but I believe
you are correct -- a GPL3 project can include GPL2 source as long as it
retains the copyright notice.
Lastly, while doing all this I came up with 2 (very) minor patches
for pacman, so I'll share those. But I'm guessing it would be better
as separate emails/threads, so I'll do it that way.
Thanks,
dave
-j
