Re: Interest in a Cosmopolitan build?

[Alex Corcoles <alex@corcoles.net>]

Hi,

> This could in principle be a good feature to support, but it also
> raises possible moral issues.  Whet software would get linked, or
> packages, dith Emacs in this kind of binary?  We may have boith a
> legal issue and a moral issue to address:
> 
> * The legal issue: would all that software satisfy the "system
> library
>   exception" in the GNU GPL?
> 
> * The moral issue: would any of that software be nonfree, and would
> it
> include any material that a straightforward byuild would NOT package
> with Emacs?
> 
> Before supporting this, we need to establish that there is no moral
> problem with it.

I share your concern. I believe Cosmopolitan might offer some benefits
to the distribution of "moral issues-free" software, which might make
it interesting to have a conversation broader than the Emacs scope
about it. Unfortunately, I don't feel equipped to have this
conversation, although I would have great interest in it. I feel
Cosmopolitan might be an important project.

About using it for Emacs, to be clear, I'm interested in using Emacs
distributed as a Cosmopolitan binary, but I don't even intend
*anything* to be done in Emacs itself, if it poses a problem. Perhaps
*something* can help Emacs be more portable or improve it, but I'm not
even sure of that. I expect a Cosmopolitan build could be maintained
out of tree (as it is now), if necessary, and be strictly opt-in.

My intention with this thread was a bit selfish- to see if any Emacs
build expert was interested in the advantages of Cosmopolitan, because
I managed to get it to a working state for me, but I fear maintenance
of this might be beyond my means- and this is already giving me some
benefits I'd like to enjoy in the future :)

About the license details, it seems it uses GCC, clang, and its own
libc. I believe there's ISC, BSD, MIT, and Apache 2.0 software being
used, however I am not an expert in licensing, and perhaps they are not
well documented. As I mentioned, I would be interested in an auditing
of Cosmopolitan from a moral perspective.

Thanks,

Álex