Re: [cdesktopenv-devel] GDE, the GNU Desktop Environment (Was: Re: OS X and Autotools)
On Mon, 24 Nov 2014 02:14:01 -0200, Bruno =?UTF-8?B?RsOpbGl4?= Rezende Ribeiro wrote: Another strange thing is that your only technical proposition was to replace the imake build systems with GNU Autotools, a proposition that was already made 1 year ago, but not accepted. That isn't strange, that's expected. Implementing a GNU building system is a technical requirement for almost all GNU packages And that is reason enough to not walk down that road. -- Download BIRT iHub F-Type - The Free Enterprise-Grade BIRT Server from Actuate! Instantly Supercharge Your Business Reports and Dashboards with Interactivity, Sharing, Native Excel Exports, App Integration more Get technology previously reserved for billion-dollar corporations, FREE http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=157005751iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk ___ cdesktopenv-devel mailing list cdesktopenv-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/cdesktopenv-devel
Re: [cdesktopenv-devel] GDE, the GNU Desktop Environment (Was: Re: OS X and Autotools)
On 11/22/2014 09:46 PM, Isaac Dunham wrote: On Sat, Nov 22, 2014 at 07:34:36PM -0200, Bruno Félix Rezende Ribeiro wrote: Em Sat, 22 Nov 2014 12:17:34 + David Mackay davidj...@gmail.com escreveu: If you are the copyright holder that can't possibly be a concern! Just ignore the violations. Being the copyright holder, only you can enforce the license. So don't prosecute them --- it's virtually the same, and that's all. Failure to prosecute every and all violation of licence leads to the licence becoming nullified on the grounds that the copyright holder doesn't care enough to protect their rights. That may be true for non-trivial licenses like GPLv3, but that's hardly the case for very permissive licenses (like X11's), as they are almost virtually identical to the public domain. And this is your defense of your argument that I could just use a copyleft (ie, nontrivial) license and not enforce it, rather than using a permissive license? You're trying to have it both ways, or forgetting what you're arguing for. Anyhow, *I* believe that a license shouldn't require something if it won't be enforced; a license is a moral document as well as legal. If I don't consider it *wrong* to distribute the software in a given way, my license should not call it wrong. That doesn't automatically work the same in negation; similarly, the principle that if I don't consider it wrong to use the software in a given way, the license should not forbid using it in that way does not mean that I should forbid any use of the software that I do consider wrong. On the topic of the Autotools: I do hope we will steer as far clear from autotools as possible. I'm sorry to hear it. with software projects abandoning autotools en-masse owing to its complicated nature and a plethora of technical faults, this would be a regression. That's not so in the view of the GNU project and in the context of the GNU operating system. Well, CDE isn't part of the GNU project or the GNU operating system. You're welcome to port it, if you wish; GNU/Linux support works fairly well. Outside GNU software, cmake is fairly popular. And outside the GNU operating system and its close relatives (which happens to be where you're promising *better* portability), autotools breaks frequently. Even having a six-year mismatch between autotools and a GNU/Linux distro, or using busybox instead of coreutils, will frequently cause breakage. The OpenBSD port maintainer has referred to problems with autotools being a major issue. A user wrote this, just upthread: | But honestly, coming from someone who has spent a good part of the | last decade doing porting to IRIX, HP-UX, OpenVMS, Tru64 UNIX, QNX, | and god knows what other shenanigans: try to avoid autotools. It's | a huge frickin mess that is virtually impossible to trace/debug/fix | if it goes nuts (and it goes nuts way too often). The evidence would seem to be pretty clear that autotools does *not* make it easier to port software to obscure platforms in net: while the code may be more portable, the build system is less so. Thanks for reading, Isaac Dunham -- Download BIRT iHub F-Type - The Free Enterprise-Grade BIRT Server from Actuate! Instantly Supercharge Your Business Reports and Dashboards with Interactivity, Sharing, Native Excel Exports, App Integration more Get technology previously reserved for billion-dollar corporations, FREE http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=157005751iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk ___ cdesktopenv-devel mailing list cdesktopenv-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/cdesktopenv-devel Even though I prefer the GPLv3 and like the GNU Project, I have to agree, GNU Autohell is a mess and should be avoided. I was actually worried when I heard about these guys using it with their fork of CDE. CMake is a much better choice. -- Pouar -- Download BIRT iHub F-Type - The Free Enterprise-Grade BIRT Server from Actuate! Instantly Supercharge Your Business Reports and Dashboards with Interactivity, Sharing, Native Excel Exports, App Integration more Get technology previously reserved for billion-dollar corporations, FREE http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=157005751iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk___ cdesktopenv-devel mailing list cdesktopenv-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/cdesktopenv-devel
Re: [cdesktopenv-devel] GDE, the GNU Desktop Environment (Was: Re: OS X and Autotools)
On Fri, 21 Nov 2014, Bruno Félix Rezende Ribeiro wrote: Em Wed, 19 Nov 2014 14:05:53 -0700 (MST) Jon Trulson j...@radscan.com escreveu: I have no objection to supporting autotool builds for CDE (but we need to not break or remove Imake support either). Nice to hear it. Naturally, for the GNU build system, I'm thinking in an approach different of that taken by the developers who have designed the original Imake build recipes (and consequently that of Oleksiy's patch which follow them closely). The original Imake files are oriented towards a fixed set of software/hardware platforms --- that's understandable, given the static nature of Imake-based build systems and the proprietary history of CDE. However, the ideal prospect GNU build system would, instead, adapt itself by testing for low-level features at configuration time, without alluding to any fixed set of rules based on a list of directives beforehand derived from the knowledge of the target hardware and software. Theoretically, one of the added benefit would be that the chances of CDE building successfully on an uncommon system, which we don't know or don't have access to, would increase. Yes, I am familiar with autotools, having used it on another opensource project. But Imake *works* *now*. I see your point regarding the ifdef hell that might ensue, but you have clearly not looked at the ifdef hell we already have :) 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. Here we have a problem. In the GNU project we are mainly concerned with user's freedom. We believe the GPLv3+ is the appropriate license for programs like the ones CDE is composed of. Our policy, however, is of contributing to existing projects under their licenses, in order to facilitate collaboration, unless our changes are big enough that copylefting them is justifiable. Nonetheless, CDE is a particular case since all its code is released under LGPLv2+, even if developers are requiring contributions to be MIT[1][sic] licensed, and as so we deem important to maintain its copyleft status. Ok, just to be clear -- ideological arguements don't mean anything to me. I contribute to open source software because I want to. I don't go into it trying to make a political point, I do it becaue I enjoy it, or the software is important to me for some reason. And if someone else can benfit from it (commercial or otherwise), so much the better. [...] I'm not giving up any particular freedom, but not copylefting code copyrighted by you is failing to protect users from any third party that may want to take away their freedom in self-interest. The GNU project believes that's harmful for the free software community and society in general in the long run. That's why we don't agree with CDE developers' policy of requiring contributions to be under a permissive license. Ok, well I'm not thinking in terms of GNU's philosophy. If you don't like a project, or it's licensing, don't contribute to it. Let me explain the main reason why Peter and I thought that requiring contributions be licensed as MIT (in the X11 sense) was a good idea: When we were working to get CDE opensourced, Motif was also part of the project. The problem was that unlike CDE, Motif had already been semi-opensource under a different license. This meant that in order to re-license Motif, all of the contributors (companies, individuals, etc) who had contributed so much as a single line of code had to be contacted, and their assent to this change recorded. In many cases, these individuals (and in some cases, companies that did not even exist anymore) could not be located. That meant that their code had to be removed, and in certain cases (critical bug fixes and the like) had to be re-implemented in a 'clean-room' environment from scratch. This was time-consuming and expensive. This delayed opensourcing both Motif and CDE for some time. Eventually, we decided to release CDE anyway, since it did not have that problem (all code was owned by TOG), and we still had no idea how long it wold be before Motif was ready. So far, I have had very few complaints about this requirement. [...] We like contributions. We aren't interested in ideology though, at least I'm not. That's a major disagreement between us. The GNU project, myself included --- as a GNU hacker, holds that the ethical principles which guide us in the defense of computer users' freedom are fundamental. Well, I might give your words more credit if I could look in CDE's git repo and see your contributions, but... :) Also, I am absolutely not worried about HP or some other company comming along and trying to release a proprietary version of CDE. Also, if you fork, you are still bound by the same licening issues we are. That's true, but for us there is no issue because we can release the resulting work as GPLv3+,
Re: [cdesktopenv-devel] GDE, the GNU Desktop Environment (Was: Re: OS X and Autotools)
On Sat, 22 Nov 2014, Edmond Orignac wrote: On Fri, Nov 21, 2014 at 07:39:09PM -0200, Bruno Félix Rezende Ribeiro wrote: Em Wed, 19 Nov 2014 14:05:53 -0700 (MST) Jon Trulsonj...@radscan.com escreveu: 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. Here we have a problem. In the GNU project we are mainly concerned with user's freedom. As opposed to programmer's freedom. You seem to have appointed yourself as Caudillo of the CDE project and you seem to be lecturing reluctant subordinates about the greatness of your vision. I believed the GNOME project (contrarily to KDE) fitted perfectly the aims of the GNU organization by being based on the non-proprietary toolkit GTK. Moreover, in order to improve the performance of GNOME, the X Window System is being abandoned on Linux in favor of Wayland, while at the same time GNOME is getting tightly integrated in the new systemd replacement for System V init. These changes are going to make CDE and Motif obsolete on the mainstream Linuxes in the coming years. So why this urge to seize control of a project by a small team of programmers that is likely to be useful only for marginal Unix type operating systems: legacy Unices, the BSDs, OpenIndiana, CRUX/Slackware Linux ? Another strange thing is that your only technical proposition was to replace the imake build systems with GNU Autotools, a proposition that was already made 1 year ago, but not accepted. It seems as if you were only looking for a plausible pretext to attempt to force your views on the CDE programmers or create a split among them. +1 This is how it appears to me too. [...] -- Jon Trulson Don't believe everything you read on the internet. --Abraham Lincoln-- Download BIRT iHub F-Type - The Free Enterprise-Grade BIRT Server from Actuate! Instantly Supercharge Your Business Reports and Dashboards with Interactivity, Sharing, Native Excel Exports, App Integration more Get technology previously reserved for billion-dollar corporations, FREE http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=157005751iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk___ cdesktopenv-devel mailing list cdesktopenv-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/cdesktopenv-devel
Re: [cdesktopenv-devel] GDE, the GNU Desktop Environment (Was: Re: OS X and Autotools)
Em Sat, 22 Nov 2014 13:53:01 +0100 Edmond Orignac edmond.orig...@wanadoo.fr escreveu: Here we have a problem. In the GNU project we are mainly concerned with user's freedom. As opposed to programmer's freedom. Freedom to subjugate other people is not freedom, it's power[1]. You seem to have appointed yourself as Caudillo of the CDE project and you seem to be lecturing reluctant subordinates about the greatness of your vision. I haven't appointed myself as anything as I don't have the power to do that --- I'm just expressing my views. If you don't stand for something you will fall for anything. I believed the GNOME project (contrarily to KDE) fitted perfectly the aims of the GNU organization by being based on the non-proprietary toolkit GTK. That's true. However, with the rise of GNOME 3 we are investigating the possibility of supporting a traditional desktop environment as well (in the 90s sense). Our efforts are also being put in GNUstep-based desktop environments. Moreover, in order to improve the performance of GNOME, the X Window System is being abandoned on Linux in favor of Wayland, while at the same time GNOME is getting tightly integrated in the new systemd replacement for System V init. These changes are going to make CDE and Motif obsolete on the mainstream Linuxes in the coming years. The official windowing system of the GNU system is X11, and we don't have plans to change that. CDE and Motif are already obsolete in the technical sense you are pointing out. However, I believe classical desktop environments must always have their place within GNU. So why this urge to seize control of a project by a small team of programmers that is likely to be useful only for marginal Unix type operating systems: legacy Unices, the BSDs, OpenIndiana, CRUX/Slackware Linux ? Don't get me wrong --- no one is trying to seize control of anything. We are just discussing possibilities for the future of CDE as a desktop environment of the GNU operating system. GNU is not a marginal Unix-like and I think CDE could be up to the task of being one of its default desktop environments: the classical one (again, in the 90s lookfeel sense). Another strange thing is that your only technical proposition was to replace the imake build systems with GNU Autotools, a proposition that was already made 1 year ago, but not accepted. That isn't strange, that's expected. Implementing a GNU building system is a technical requirement for almost all GNU packages, therefore it would be one of the first things we would need to implement if CDE were to be turned into a GNU official desktop environment. It seems as if you were only looking for a plausible pretext to attempt to force your views on the CDE programmers or create a split among them. Please, don't be that cynic. You have already used some innuendoes about the possible corruption of some of the programmers with sentences such as eventually and deliberately letting some self-interested people or corporation take away CDE's users freedom, the bloated and awful Sourceforge web interface and its commercial appeal [...]comercial advertising! How can developers tolerate this behavior in every corner of their development facilities?. Those are not insinuations; rather, they are the GNU project's vision on copyleft and my personal view on intrusive commercial hosting of free software projects, respectively. I am only a user, but I am extremely uncomfortable with someone like you being the self-appointed guardian of my liberty. As I've said, I didn't appoint myself to anything and you shouldn't feel threatened by my or GNU project's views. Besides, forks of open source programs based purely on pseudo-legal argument have already resulted in technical disasters. GNU project's arguments supporting copyleft are based on pragmatism and idealism. I don't know what you mean by pseudo-legal, though. Footnotes: [1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/freedom-or-power.html -- ,= ,-_-. =. Bruno Félix Rezende Ribeiro (oitofelix) [0x28D618AF] ((_/)o o(\_)) There is no system but GNU; `-'(. .)`-' GNU Linux-Libre is one of its official kernels; \_/ All software must be free as in freedom; -- Download BIRT iHub F-Type - The Free Enterprise-Grade BIRT Server from Actuate! Instantly Supercharge Your Business Reports and Dashboards with Interactivity, Sharing, Native Excel Exports, App Integration more Get technology previously reserved for billion-dollar corporations, FREE http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=157005751iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk ___ cdesktopenv-devel mailing list cdesktopenv-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/cdesktopenv-devel
Re: [cdesktopenv-devel] GDE, the GNU Desktop Environment (Was: Re: OS X and Autotools)
It's perfectly legal to just ignore your request. This is your right, but it's also incredibly impolite and abrasive. It will not facilitate good relationship with those who are actually /contributing/ to CDE. If you are the copyright holder that can't possibly be a concern! Just ignore the violations. Being the copyright holder, only you can enforce the license. So don't prosecute them --- it's virtually the same, and that's all. Failure to prosecute every and all violation of licence leads to the licence becoming nullified on the grounds that the copyright holder doesn't care enough to protect their rights. On the topic of the Autotools: I do hope we will steer as far clear from autotools as possible. CDE's build system is somewhat antiquated, and a rehaul would be a prudent idea, but autotools is not appropriate. In this day and age, with software projects abandoning autotools en-masse owing to its complicated nature and a plethora of technical faults, this would be a regression. -- Download BIRT iHub F-Type - The Free Enterprise-Grade BIRT Server from Actuate! Instantly Supercharge Your Business Reports and Dashboards with Interactivity, Sharing, Native Excel Exports, App Integration more Get technology previously reserved for billion-dollar corporations, FREE http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=157005751iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk ___ cdesktopenv-devel mailing list cdesktopenv-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/cdesktopenv-devel
Re: [cdesktopenv-devel] GDE, the GNU Desktop Environment (Was: Re: OS X and Autotools)
On Fri, Nov 21, 2014 at 07:39:09PM -0200, Bruno Félix Rezende Ribeiro wrote: Em Wed, 19 Nov 2014 14:05:53 -0700 (MST) Jon Trulsonj...@radscan.com escreveu: 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. Here we have a problem. In the GNU project we are mainly concerned with user's freedom. As opposed to programmer's freedom. You seem to have appointed yourself as Caudillo of the CDE project and you seem to be lecturing reluctant subordinates about the greatness of your vision. I believed the GNOME project (contrarily to KDE) fitted perfectly the aims of the GNU organization by being based on the non-proprietary toolkit GTK. Moreover, in order to improve the performance of GNOME, the X Window System is being abandoned on Linux in favor of Wayland, while at the same time GNOME is getting tightly integrated in the new systemd replacement for System V init. These changes are going to make CDE and Motif obsolete on the mainstream Linuxes in the coming years. So why this urge to seize control of a project by a small team of programmers that is likely to be useful only for marginal Unix type operating systems: legacy Unices, the BSDs, OpenIndiana, CRUX/Slackware Linux ? Another strange thing is that your only technical proposition was to replace the imake build systems with GNU Autotools, a proposition that was already made 1 year ago, but not accepted. It seems as if you were only looking for a plausible pretext to attempt to force your views on the CDE programmers or create a split among them. You have already used some innuendoes about the possible corruption of some of the programmers with sentences such as eventually and deliberately letting some self-interested people or corporation take away CDE's users freedom, the bloated and awful Sourceforge web interface and its commercial appeal [...]comercial advertising! How can developers tolerate this behavior in every corner of their development facilities?. I am only a user, but I am extremely uncomfortable with someone like you being the self-appointed guardian of my liberty. Besides, forks of open source programs based purely on pseudo-legal argument have already resulted in technical disasters. A remarkable example is with cdrecord/wodim https://web.archive.org/web/20140223032844/http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/linux-dist.html -- Download BIRT iHub F-Type - The Free Enterprise-Grade BIRT Server from Actuate! Instantly Supercharge Your Business Reports and Dashboards with Interactivity, Sharing, Native Excel Exports, App Integration more Get technology previously reserved for billion-dollar corporations, FREE http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=157005751iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk ___ cdesktopenv-devel mailing list cdesktopenv-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/cdesktopenv-devel
Re: [cdesktopenv-devel] GDE, the GNU Desktop Environment (Was: Re: OS X and Autotools)
On Saturday, November 22, 2014 01:53:01 PM Edmond Orignac wrote: On Fri, Nov 21, 2014 at 07:39:09PM -0200, Bruno Félix Rezende Ribeiro wrote: Em Wed, 19 Nov 2014 14:05:53 -0700 (MST) Jon Trulsonj...@radscan.com escreveu: 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. Here we have a problem. In the GNU project we are mainly concerned with user's freedom. As opposed to programmer's freedom. You seem to have appointed yourself as Caudillo of the CDE project and you seem to be lecturing reluctant subordinates about the greatness of your vision. I believed the GNOME project (contrarily to KDE) fitted perfectly the aims of the GNU organization by being based on the non-proprietary toolkit GTK. Moreover, in order to improve the performance of GNOME, the X Window System is being abandoned on Linux in favor of Wayland, while at the same time GNOME is getting tightly integrated in the new systemd replacement for System V init. These changes are going to make CDE and Motif obsolete on the mainstream Linuxes in the coming years. So why this urge to seize control of a project by a small team of programmers that is likely to be useful only for marginal Unix type operating systems: legacy Unices, the BSDs, OpenIndiana, CRUX/Slackware Linux ? This is just one user's opinion (I've made a few small contributions, but nothing serious so I wouldn't count myself as anything more than an interested user) but... I use CDE because it's not trying to be anything other than a legacy desktop updated to work on modern platforms. I don't really care much about how modern it is or whether it serves the needs of a philosophically-driven Linux distro. If I wanted that, I'd use GNOME. I also don't care if it follows the One True Path of GNU, as I'm not a disciple of that particular faith. I do, however, care if it starts sprouting dependencies on GNU software that I don't use. I do care if it becomes another vehicle to promote the (L)GPL to the exclusion of other licenses. I do care if it starts depending on parts of the Linux stack or assumes that one is a Linux user. I don't think that last one is necessarily a concern in what's being proposed, but given the motivation the thought is at least in the back of my mind. Not every project that uses a non-GNU license is a battle that needs to be won for your cause. Sometimes folks just use different licenses. Live and let live. -Rob -- Connection terminated by beer -- Download BIRT iHub F-Type - The Free Enterprise-Grade BIRT Server from Actuate! Instantly Supercharge Your Business Reports and Dashboards with Interactivity, Sharing, Native Excel Exports, App Integration more Get technology previously reserved for billion-dollar corporations, FREE http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=157005751iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk ___ cdesktopenv-devel mailing list cdesktopenv-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/cdesktopenv-devel
Re: [cdesktopenv-devel] GDE, the GNU Desktop Environment (Was: Re: OS X and Autotools)
I've been with the CDE project pretty much from the start. 75% of the wiki is my work and despite my absence on IRC (new job, less time for the Internet) I still use CDE everyday. I don't really understand why it's so important to fork CDE. If you have deep philosophical differences with the project, go ahead and fork it but don't call it CDE because that would cause confusion. You need not debate us here. Just do it. CDE is being updated to run on modern computers and I don't see a reason to fork it but go ahead, knock yourself out. I have been the guy opposed to things like systrays and such and someday I'll get outvoted on it. -- Download BIRT iHub F-Type - The Free Enterprise-Grade BIRT Server from Actuate! Instantly Supercharge Your Business Reports and Dashboards with Interactivity, Sharing, Native Excel Exports, App Integration more Get technology previously reserved for billion-dollar corporations, FREE http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=157005751iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk___ cdesktopenv-devel mailing list cdesktopenv-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/cdesktopenv-devel
Re: [cdesktopenv-devel] GDE, the GNU Desktop Environment (Was: Re: OS X and Autotools)
On Sat, 22 Nov 2014, Lennert Van Alboom wrote: On Sat, Nov 22, 2014 at 12:17:34PM +, David Mackay wrote: On the topic of the Autotools: I do hope we will steer as far clear from autotools as possible. CDE's build system is somewhat antiquated, and a rehaul would be a prudent idea, but autotools is not appropriate. In this day and age, with software projects abandoning autotools en-masse owing to its complicated nature and a plethora of technical faults, this would be a regression. +1 for this part. While I personally don't really care much about the actual license CDE and its bits bobs are under - I find GPLv3 to be restrictive enough to be preferrably avoided, but I don't have code in CDE so it's not up to me to complain - the more permissive a license, the better, as far as I'm concerned. +1 here First, to improve our support for unknown systems I'd propose to fix many of #ifdef XxxArchitecture which got included recently by yours truly. That brings us closer to better supporting of new/unknown/strange systems. For automated feature detection we might use iffe which afaik is already in-tree by the graces of ksh93. Maybe we should update our ksh before doing that (and maybe provide support to build dtksh using already installed ksh library). porting ksh93 to autotools might be a huge, lengthy and largely unnecessary project //Marcin -- Download BIRT iHub F-Type - The Free Enterprise-Grade BIRT Server from Actuate! Instantly Supercharge Your Business Reports and Dashboards with Interactivity, Sharing, Native Excel Exports, App Integration more Get technology previously reserved for billion-dollar corporations, FREE http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=157005751iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk ___ cdesktopenv-devel mailing list cdesktopenv-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/cdesktopenv-devel
Re: [cdesktopenv-devel] GDE, the GNU Desktop Environment (Was: Re: OS X and Autotools)
On Sat, 22 Nov 2014, Rob Tomsick wrote: On Saturday, November 22, 2014 01:53:01 PM Edmond Orignac wrote: I believed the GNOME project (contrarily to KDE) fitted perfectly the aims of the GNU organization by being based on the non-proprietary toolkit GTK. Moreover, in order to improve the performance of GNOME, the X Window System is being abandoned on Linux in favor of Wayland, while at the same time GNOME is getting tightly integrated in the new systemd replacement for System V init. These changes are going to make CDE and Motif obsolete on the mainstream Linuxes in the coming years. So why this urge to seize control of a project by a small team of programmers that is likely to be useful only for marginal Unix type operating systems: legacy Unices, the BSDs, OpenIndiana, CRUX/Slackware Linux ? This is just one user's opinion (I've made a few small contributions, but nothing serious so I wouldn't count myself as anything more than an interested user) but... I use CDE because it's not trying to be anything other than a legacy desktop updated to work on modern platforms. I don't really care much about how modern it is or whether it serves the needs of a philosophically-driven Linux distro. If I wanted that, I'd use GNOME. I also don't care if it follows the One True Path of GNU, as I'm not a disciple of that particular faith. I do, however, care if it starts sprouting dependencies on GNU software that I don't use. I do care if it becomes another vehicle to promote the (L)GPL to the exclusion of other licenses. I do care if it starts depending on parts of the Linux stack or assumes that one is a Linux user. I don't think that last one is necessarily a concern in what's being proposed, but given the motivation the thought is at least in the back of my mind. Totally agree. I agree in spirit with the GPL, that software that is left completely free tends to end up becoming the basis of commercial projects that embrace, extend, and extinguish open ones...but does anyone who still wants to run CDE in 2014 care about that? I'm just a user, but my main concern now that CDE has been brought back to life is just seeing it remain CDE. I want it to stay built on Motif, look the way it does, act the way it does (with possibly bugfixing excepted), and the only features that should be added are ones that are necessary to be relevant on a modern computer. (For example, full modern RandR support would be nice...how many people still run multihead displays in Zaphod mode?) I was very pleased to see not just one but basically all of the BSD's jumping into this project. A CDE that becomes so dependent on Linux code that it can't run on BSD without deep kludges isn't CDE anymore. As for the often heard complaint about CDE/Motif that they're ugly -- I suppose that's in the eye of the beholder. My first exposure to CDE was on old HP/UX workstations long ago. I wanted to know what the gorgeous desktop they were putting on those things was. Please don't improve it by turning it into something else. If we wanted something else, we'd be running it already. -- + Brent A. Busby + We've all heard that a million monkeys + Sr. UNIX Systems Admin + banging on a million typewriters will + University of Chicago + eventually reproduce the entire works of + James Franck Institute + Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, + Materials Research Ctr + we know this is not true. -Robert Wilensky -- Download BIRT iHub F-Type - The Free Enterprise-Grade BIRT Server from Actuate! Instantly Supercharge Your Business Reports and Dashboards with Interactivity, Sharing, Native Excel Exports, App Integration more Get technology previously reserved for billion-dollar corporations, FREE http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=157005751iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk ___ cdesktopenv-devel mailing list cdesktopenv-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/cdesktopenv-devel
Re: [cdesktopenv-devel] GDE, the GNU Desktop Environment (Was: Re: OS X and Autotools)
On 11/22/2014 04:50 PM, Brent Busby wrote: Totally agree. I agree in spirit with the GPL, that software that is left completely free tends to end up becoming the basis of commercial projects that embrace, extend, and extinguish open ones...but does anyone who still wants to run CDE in 2014 care about that? It's becoming proprietary software you need to worry about, not whether they charge money or not. -- Pouar -- Download BIRT iHub F-Type - The Free Enterprise-Grade BIRT Server from Actuate! Instantly Supercharge Your Business Reports and Dashboards with Interactivity, Sharing, Native Excel Exports, App Integration more Get technology previously reserved for billion-dollar corporations, FREE http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=157005751iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk___ cdesktopenv-devel mailing list cdesktopenv-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/cdesktopenv-devel
Re: [cdesktopenv-devel] GDE, the GNU Desktop Environment (Was: Re: OS X and Autotools)
Em Wed, 19 Nov 2014 14:05:53 -0700 (MST) Jon Trulson j...@radscan.com escreveu: I have no objection to supporting autotool builds for CDE (but we need to not break or remove Imake support either). Nice to hear it. Naturally, for the GNU build system, I'm thinking in an approach different of that taken by the developers who have designed the original Imake build recipes (and consequently that of Oleksiy's patch which follow them closely). The original Imake files are oriented towards a fixed set of software/hardware platforms --- that's understandable, given the static nature of Imake-based build systems and the proprietary history of CDE. However, the ideal prospect GNU build system would, instead, adapt itself by testing for low-level features at configuration time, without alluding to any fixed set of rules based on a list of directives beforehand derived from the knowledge of the target hardware and software. Theoretically, one of the added benefit would be that the chances of CDE building successfully on an uncommon system, which we don't know or don't have access to, would increase. 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. Here we have a problem. In the GNU project we are mainly concerned with user's freedom. We believe the GPLv3+ is the appropriate license for programs like the ones CDE is composed of. Our policy, however, is of contributing to existing projects under their licenses, in order to facilitate collaboration, unless our changes are big enough that copylefting them is justifiable. Nonetheless, CDE is a particular case since all its code is released under LGPLv2+, even if developers are requiring contributions to be MIT[1][sic] licensed, and as so we deem important to maintain its copyleft status. 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. That's good! 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? The mess of having to maintain two separate and technically very different building systems, doubling the work of test and implementation, and increasing the likelihood of breaking things. 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. For the pragmatic point of view of what's wrong with a permissive license and why we should use copyleft see [2]. For a philosophical one see [3]. 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? I'm not giving up any particular freedom, but not copylefting code copyrighted by you is failing to protect users from any third party that may want to take away their freedom in self-interest. The GNU project believes that's harmful for the free software community and society in general in the long run. That's why we don't agree with CDE developers' policy of requiring contributions to be under a permissive license. Why can't an autotools system co-exist with Imake? In principle it can, but I don't see why If we had an appropriate GNU build system replacement. We like contributions. We aren't interested in ideology though, at least I'm not. That's a major disagreement between us. The GNU project, myself included --- as a GNU hacker, holds that the ethical principles which guide us in the defense of computer users' freedom are fundamental. Also, if you fork, you are still bound by the same licening issues we are. That's true, but for us there is no issue because we can release the resulting work as GPLv3+, exactly as we would like to. Well, we get a free platform for development... I don't read the ads attached to mailing list messages. Do you? No, I don't. That doesn't mean I'm not annoyed by them, though. Is the real issue here that we request contributions be MIT?
Re: [cdesktopenv-devel] GDE, the GNU Desktop Environment (Was: Re: OS X and Autotools)
Em Fri, 21 Nov 2014 19:46:42 -0800 Isaac Dunham ibid...@gmail.com escrow: At least one minor contribution (the script desktop2dt, which converts some *.desktop files to the type of file CDE expects) is under a permissive MIT license: # Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a # copy of this software and associated documentation files (the Software), # to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation # the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, # and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the # Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: # # The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in # all copies or substantial portions of the Software. # insert standard disclaimer of warranty here The copyright for this file is mine. I would like to let it be known that while I have indicated that the CDE project may relicense my work, the above license does not permit replacement with another license. If you fork CDE, you have all the permissions granted by the text of the license, but *not* the ability to relicense the script in question. You can't retroactively change the license of a program, even if you are the copyright holder. As your work stands now, we can re-license it, as long as we comply with the license: that's preserving the notices. It's the whole point of permissive licenses. If you happen to change your license to a GPLv3+ incompatible one, we would re-license the latest permissive-licensed version of it. You should give up permissiveness, or live up with that. I would also like to request, but not require, that the maintainer not relicense this file under a less permissive license. It's perfectly legal to just ignore your request. Considering that a script is interpreted, I'm not sure that there's much chance of copyleft vs. permissive making a difference for this file. Why do you say that? For example, copyleft would prevent people from making proprietary versions of it that could possibly limit redistribution. And I'm ready to apply the same principle to my own standalone C code: what I wrote for my pleasure is out there regardless whether someone else provides source code, and the risk of careless violation of the license is of more concern to me. If you are the copyright holder that can't possibly be a concern! Just ignore the violations. Being the copyright holder, only you can enforce the license. If someone grabs a copy of a binary without a license, then shares it with someone else, I don't want to be responsible for making it a violation of the license. So don't prosecute them --- it's virtually the same, and that's all. -- ,= ,-_-. =. Bruno Félix Rezende Ribeiro (oitofelix) [0x28D618AF] ((_/)o o(\_)) There is no system but GNU; `-'(. .)`-' GNU Linux-Libre is one of its official kernels; \_/ All software must be free as in freedom; -- Download BIRT iHub F-Type - The Free Enterprise-Grade BIRT Server from Actuate! Instantly Supercharge Your Business Reports and Dashboards with Interactivity, Sharing, Native Excel Exports, App Integration more Get technology previously reserved for billion-dollar corporations, FREE http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=157005751iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk ___ cdesktopenv-devel mailing list cdesktopenv-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/cdesktopenv-devel
Re: [cdesktopenv-devel] GDE, the GNU Desktop Environment (Was: Re: OS X and Autotools)
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
Re: [cdesktopenv-devel] GDE, the GNU Desktop Environment (Was: Re: OS X and Autotools)
On Tue, 18 Nov 2014, Steven Edwards wrote: Hi Bruno, On Tue, Nov 18, 2014 at 3:43 AM, Bruno Félix Rezende Ribeiro oitofe...@gnu.org wrote: 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. CDE has been around for a long time and supports a lot of platforms despite it being a tangled mess, I suspect they don't want to break legacy since it would drive off as many people as it will bring in, at least initially. Well, I guess it would help to define legacy. I could care less about KR C compilers and machines that were obsoleted in the 90's. I would like CDE to build and run on as many modern systems as possible. As far as I know, it mostly does. [...] -- Jon Trulson Don't believe everything you read on the internet. --Abraham Lincoln-- Download BIRT iHub F-Type - The Free Enterprise-Grade BIRT Server from Actuate! Instantly Supercharge Your Business Reports and Dashboards with Interactivity, Sharing, Native Excel Exports, App Integration more Get technology previously reserved for billion-dollar corporations, FREE http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=157005751iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk___ cdesktopenv-devel mailing list cdesktopenv-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/cdesktopenv-devel
Re: [cdesktopenv-devel] GDE, the GNU Desktop Environment (Was: Re: OS X and Autotools)
On Tue, 18 Nov 2014, Richard L. Hamilton wrote: Copyleft vs permissive license arguments get in the way of making good technical decisions IMO - except when the distinction is needed for NON-ideological arguments. +1 Backwards compatibility has a couple of points to commend it: * not alienating existing base in the hopes of pursuing a new base * although it’s more work, the discipline involved CAN result in cleaner code in the long run. We have already cleaned up quite a lot of cruft. There is still much more to do in that regard, regardless of the build system being used. IMO if X.org dumped imake, that’s a good reason to think about doing the same; HOWEVER, _if_ some of the platforms that the hardcore copyleft advocates would ignore cannot reasonably support autotools, then IMO that _is_ a reason to accept the complexity of dual build systems. To those who think that code has some natural right to be open source, backwards compatibility is merely a compromise with the lack of that; but to those who simply want to USE something and leave the ideology behind, it’s _necessary_. I’ve got Macs (Mac Mini 2007 and 2011) and Suns (the most modern being a T5240) at home, and while from time to time I run a Linux VM on one of the Macs, it’s not what I use on a daily basis, but simply something for re-creating situations others might encounter. Again, I do not mind dumping Imake eventually. But it's replacement needs to actually exist, and work before we can consider that -- for obvious reasons. My immediate interest is getting CDE on OS X and Solaris 11. AFAIK, both of those either have automake/autoconf from the vendor, or have it in a reasonably well-supported packaging of free software (e.g. MacPorts for OS X). So I would suppose porting to OS X (Solaris 11 supposedly more or less works, although I gather SPARC hasn’t been tried yet?) is if anything likelier with autotools than without. Probably not, but original CDE ran on sparc, so I don't see a huge issue there. Mac on the otherhand -- I have no experience there. [...] -- Jon Trulson Don't believe everything you read on the internet. --Abraham Lincoln-- Download BIRT iHub F-Type - The Free Enterprise-Grade BIRT Server from Actuate! Instantly Supercharge Your Business Reports and Dashboards with Interactivity, Sharing, Native Excel Exports, App Integration more Get technology previously reserved for billion-dollar corporations, FREE http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=157005751iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk___ cdesktopenv-devel mailing list cdesktopenv-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/cdesktopenv-devel
Re: [cdesktopenv-devel] GDE, the GNU Desktop Environment (Was: Re: OS X and Autotools)
On Nov 19, 2014, at 4:12 PM, Jon Trulson j...@radscan.com wrote: On Tue, 18 Nov 2014, Richard L. Hamilton wrote: […] My immediate interest is getting CDE on OS X and Solaris 11. AFAIK, both of those either have automake/autoconf from the vendor, or have it in a reasonably well-supported packaging of free software (e.g. MacPorts for OS X). So I would suppose porting to OS X (Solaris 11 supposedly more or less works, although I gather SPARC hasn’t been tried yet?) is if anything likelier with autotools than without. Probably not, but original CDE ran on sparc, so I don't see a huge issue there. Mac on the otherhand -- I have no experience there. FYI, I built Motif on Solaris 11.2 (current as of what’s available without a support contract, aside from adding a non-vendor fix for the bash vulnerability) easily enough. I was pleased to see it didn’t clobber any vendor files I already had installed (and AFAIK I had a fairly complete install to start with). I got a list of what it added by comparing a zfs snapshot before and after, which let me be sure it hadn’t clobbered anything (and gave me the option of rolling back if it had). I haven’t really figured out the packaging mechanism new to Solaris 11 though, only know the SVR4 packaging (which still works, but is not repository based and is not preferred on Solaris 11). So haven’t made a package of it yet; and have enough going on for a few days that I probably won’t get further for awhile. The Mac kernel is XNU - Mach + FreeBSD more or less; but the userspace, include files etc are not occasionally without surprises. automake, autoconf, and libtool don’t appear to be included, but can be added using the free MacPorts infrastructure (which is how IMO it would be nice to eventually have CDE packaged for Mac, as whatever additional build files and patches etc as that might require, and that could also offer its own binary package). The current (unbundled, but easily installable) X.org build for Macs AFAIK has no imake support, and while that also can be found in MacPorts, I don’t know where to start to find out if it will do me any good. Maybe I can look at the FreeBSD build instructions sometime and see whether anything can be done starting with them. -- Download BIRT iHub F-Type - The Free Enterprise-Grade BIRT Server from Actuate! Instantly Supercharge Your Business Reports and Dashboards with Interactivity, Sharing, Native Excel Exports, App Integration more Get technology previously reserved for billion-dollar corporations, FREE http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=157005751iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk ___ cdesktopenv-devel mailing list cdesktopenv-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/cdesktopenv-devel
Re: [cdesktopenv-devel] GDE, the GNU Desktop Environment (Was: Re: OS X and Autotools)
On 20/11/2014 13:53, Richard L. Hamilton wrote: You’re quite right, I didn’t have that package installed. It quite surprises me that a full desktop install didn’t include even the motif lib and headers anymore. :-/ Do we know whether a build of CDE should work with the vendor Motif libs? See http://sourceforge.net/p/cdesktopenv/discussion/general/thread/04877048/#e39c/9c69 I didn't even try to build with the vendor version of motif but, surpisingly, when I was first trying to build CDE I noticed it was linking (successfully) with vendor motif rather than my installed openmotif libraries. Includes were from openmotif though. I've since fixed this. And are either of those packages available for SPARC? (I have a T5240, but only VMs on my Mac for Solaris x86, which I’m not likely to leave running given the memory and performance hit) Unfortunately i don't have a SPARC system to build/test on so only x86. Sorry. Regards Murray -- Download BIRT iHub F-Type - The Free Enterprise-Grade BIRT Server from Actuate! Instantly Supercharge Your Business Reports and Dashboards with Interactivity, Sharing, Native Excel Exports, App Integration more Get technology previously reserved for billion-dollar corporations, FREE http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=157005751iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk ___ cdesktopenv-devel mailing list cdesktopenv-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/cdesktopenv-devel
Re: [cdesktopenv-devel] GDE, the GNU Desktop Environment (Was: Re: OS X and Autotools)
Hmm…if you have a writeup of what you did to build Motif and then CDE, I can certainly take a shot at replicating it on my T5240, although it may be next week before I can get much done; didn’t realize the scarcity of modern SPARC in hands free to use it as they wished. :-) (I’ve way too many Suns in the house, only three (SunBlade 100, SunBlade 2000, T5240) of which run anymore, and only one of which can run Solaris 11) On Nov 20, 2014, at 1:12 AM, Murray Blakeman murr...@solarismultimedia.com wrote: On 20/11/2014 13:53, Richard L. Hamilton wrote: You’re quite right, I didn’t have that package installed. It quite surprises me that a full desktop install didn’t include even the motif lib and headers anymore. :-/ Do we know whether a build of CDE should work with the vendor Motif libs? See http://sourceforge.net/p/cdesktopenv/discussion/general/thread/04877048/#e39c/9c69 I didn't even try to build with the vendor version of motif but, surpisingly, when I was first trying to build CDE I noticed it was linking (successfully) with vendor motif rather than my installed openmotif libraries. Includes were from openmotif though. I've since fixed this. And are either of those packages available for SPARC? (I have a T5240, but only VMs on my Mac for Solaris x86, which I’m not likely to leave running given the memory and performance hit) Unfortunately i don't have a SPARC system to build/test on so only x86. Sorry. Regards Murray -- Download BIRT iHub F-Type - The Free Enterprise-Grade BIRT Server from Actuate! Instantly Supercharge Your Business Reports and Dashboards with Interactivity, Sharing, Native Excel Exports, App Integration more Get technology previously reserved for billion-dollar corporations, FREE http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=157005751iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk ___ cdesktopenv-devel mailing list cdesktopenv-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/cdesktopenv-devel -- Download BIRT iHub F-Type - The Free Enterprise-Grade BIRT Server from Actuate! Instantly Supercharge Your Business Reports and Dashboards with Interactivity, Sharing, Native Excel Exports, App Integration more Get technology previously reserved for billion-dollar corporations, FREE http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=157005751iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk ___ cdesktopenv-devel mailing list cdesktopenv-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/cdesktopenv-devel
Re: [cdesktopenv-devel] GDE, the GNU Desktop Environment (Was: Re: OS X and Autotools)
Hi Bruno, On Tue, Nov 18, 2014 at 3:43 AM, Bruno Félix Rezende Ribeiro oitofe...@gnu.org wrote: 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. CDE has been around for a long time and supports a lot of platforms despite it being a tangled mess, I suspect they don't want to break legacy since it would drive off as many people as it will bring in, at least initially. 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. Awesome, thanks for the link! His work is a much better starting point than mine. I am by no means an autotools expert, I've just started to scratch the surface because I am interested in learning more about how they work. I was able to get most of the object files for dtfile to compile and have been working my way backwards down the various libraries through the evening. https://github.com/sedwards/cde/compare/develop 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. 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. I don't mind using more permissive licensing, if for no other reason than to make sharing patches easier, but also to honor the intentions/desires of the other authors, but I am afraid your right about the need to fork it to clean it up. I think it would be better to view the existing CDE release as frozen and break whatever needs to be broken to bring it up to date on Linux, BSD and OS X. 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 prefer to work out of github, however it's easy enough to add other remotes to git. My tree pushes to both my sourceforge and my github accounts so if you wanted to spawn up an 'offical' fork on Savannah, I can add that as a remote and push to it first. What do you think? Don't you want to contribute to this effort even further? Sure, I'm going to read through Oleksiy's patch try to take advantage of the work he already did. I've specifically not tried to support many platforms out the gate just to keep things simple so I might end up combining my configure script with his Makefiles. Thanks for the feedback and help! -- Steven Edwards There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come. - Victor Hugo -- Download BIRT iHub F-Type - The Free Enterprise-Grade BIRT Server from Actuate! Instantly Supercharge Your Business Reports and Dashboards with Interactivity, Sharing, Native Excel Exports, App Integration more Get technology previously reserved for billion-dollar corporations, FREE http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=157005751iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk___ cdesktopenv-devel mailing list cdesktopenv-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/cdesktopenv-devel
Re: [cdesktopenv-devel] GDE, the GNU Desktop Environment (Was: Re: OS X and Autotools)
Copyleft vs permissive license arguments get in the way of making good technical decisions IMO - except when the distinction is needed for NON-ideological arguments. Backwards compatibility has a couple of points to commend it: * not alienating existing base in the hopes of pursuing a new base * although it’s more work, the discipline involved CAN result in cleaner code in the long run. IMO if X.org dumped imake, that’s a good reason to think about doing the same; HOWEVER, _if_ some of the platforms that the hardcore copyleft advocates would ignore cannot reasonably support autotools, then IMO that _is_ a reason to accept the complexity of dual build systems. To those who think that code has some natural right to be open source, backwards compatibility is merely a compromise with the lack of that; but to those who simply want to USE something and leave the ideology behind, it’s _necessary_. I’ve got Macs (Mac Mini 2007 and 2011) and Suns (the most modern being a T5240) at home, and while from time to time I run a Linux VM on one of the Macs, it’s not what I use on a daily basis, but simply something for re-creating situations others might encounter. My immediate interest is getting CDE on OS X and Solaris 11. AFAIK, both of those either have automake/autoconf from the vendor, or have it in a reasonably well-supported packaging of free software (e.g. MacPorts for OS X). So I would suppose porting to OS X (Solaris 11 supposedly more or less works, although I gather SPARC hasn’t been tried yet?) is if anything likelier with autotools than without. On Nov 18, 2014, at 6:43 AM, Bruno Félix Rezende Ribeiro oitofe...@gnu.org 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. 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. 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. 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. 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]. 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! 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? 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? -- ,= ,-_-. =. Bruno Félix Rezende Ribeiro (oitofelix) [0x28D618AF] ((_/)o o(\_)) There is no system but GNU; `-'(. .)`-' GNU Linux-Libre is one of its official kernels; \_/ All software must be free as in freedom; -- Download BIRT iHub F-Type - The
