On Mon, 15 May 2000, Matt Sergeant <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote
> On Mon, 15 May 2000, Kaiserovi wrote:
>
>> We would like to know your opinion on the following issue. We received a
>> suggestion for changing the Sablotron license from GNU GPL to GNU LGPL
>> (Library or Lesser GPL). The reason in this particular case was the
>> planned development of a Delphi interface; in general, the change would
>> make the library accessible to developers of proprietary software, while
>> any extensions or modifications of it would have to remain LGPL.
>>
>> It seems to us that the LGPL would be OK for Sablotron, and that if such
>> a change is to be made, it should be made soon. We want to ask whether
>> you have any objections to the license change. Please let us know,
>> especially if you have already contributed some code or you are
>> considering doing so.
>>
>> We hope you understand that this step has nothing to do with "closing"
>> the software - it just makes it useable for more people.
>
> That works fine for me - in fact AxKit probably wasn't compliant with
> the license in the case of the pure GPL.
I'd strongly support this. Without it, my use of Sablotron would be a
temporary measure until something else came along.
While on the topic (well you were anyway, I've just joined the list), I
think some consideration should be given to how expat is used within
Sablotron. The distributed source is not the original expat, but a
modified version. This should really be distributed as the original
(or possibly a subset of the original source) plus the diffs applied for
sablotron.
The LD_LIBRARY_PATH requirement is ugly, but as things stand it's
necessary so as not to put the modified libxmltok.so* and libxmlparse.so*
libraries where they will screw up other programs which expect the orignal
expat versions. Personally I think that since the expat stuff is specific
to Sablotron, it should be linked into the libsablot.so* library, making
this clean for installation into system library areas if desired. The
alternative would be to rename them as something like libsabxmltok.so* and
libsabxmlparse.so*.
Over the weekend I've been mucking around with trying to get a freebsd
port of Sablotron going. I got most of the way through following the
existing scheme for making things work across platforms, and then decided
to ditch it and have a go at rebuilding the build system from scratch
using autoconf, automake, libtool etc. and rearanging the directories to a
more standard gnu'ish layout. Once done, this should work on pretty much
any unix system, but I'm not sure whether it caters to Windows. Probably
the Windows makefiles would have to remain. Anyone know about this?
This is my first shot at using the GNU build system. It seems sensible
enough, and I imagine it's a time saver in the long run, but there's a
fair bit to figure out. My main difficulty at this stage is that I don't
have any way of testing whether components are doing what they are
supposed to. Does anyone have any test programs for the modified expat
libs and/or libsablot?
I'm not sure whether this reworking of the Sablotron package is going to
wind up being an exercise for my benefit, or something that other people
want to see rolled into the distribution. Feedback would be much
appreciated.
Andrew McNaughton
--
Andrew McNaughton
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
