The current rules for making Emacs binaries available on the net?

The current rules for making Emacs binaries available on the net?

[Lennart Borgman]

What are the rules now for publishing Emacs binaries from the
development sources? Is it sufficient to say that the are compiled
from the bazaar sources, or?

Re: The current rules for making Emacs binaries available on the net?

[Richard Stallman]

See the GPL FAQ which is in gnu.org/licenses
for GPL questions.

Re: The current rules for making Emacs binaries available on the net?

[Lennart Borgman]

On Fri, May 14, 2010 at 11:03 PM, Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> wrote:
> See the GPL FAQ which is in gnu.org/licenses
> for GPL questions.

The section that is closes to my question seems to be this
(http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#UnchangedJustBinary):

   Can I put the binaries on my Internet server and put the
   source on a different Internet site?

      Yes. Section 6(d) allows this. However, you must
      provide clear instructions people can follow to obtain
      the source, and you must take care to make sure that
      the source remains available for as long as you
      distribute the object code.

Now if someone distributes unpatched binaries built from Emacs sources
is it then enough to tell from where this sources can be downloaded
and what revision number the checkout had?

My impression before was that this was not allowed, but looking at it
again I can not see why it should not be allowed.

Re: The current rules for making Emacs binaries available on the net?

[Richard Stallman]

	  Yes. Section 6(d) allows this. However, you must
	  provide clear instructions people can follow to obtain
	  the source, and you must take care to make sure that
	  the source remains available for as long as you
	  distribute the object code.

    Now if someone distributes unpatched binaries built from Emacs sources
    is it then enough to tell from where this sources can be downloaded
    and what revision number the checkout had?

That would satisfy the first clause.  There is also the second clause:
you must take care to make sure that the source remains available for
as long as you distribute the object code.

Re: The current rules for making Emacs binaries available on the net?

[David Reitter]

On May 14, 2010, at 6:51 PM, Lennart Borgman wrote:
> 
> Now if someone distributes unpatched binaries built from Emacs sources
> is it then enough to tell from where this sources can be downloaded
> and what revision number the checkout had?

Apart from the GPL, what is also important is to support the sustainability of the project by animating people to write code and contribute patches.

In my experience, binary distributions are not necessarily productive in that sense.  It is important to make it dead-easy for people to install the source distribution and build from it.  Pre-requesites should be spelled out, a standard build system and sequence (./configure; make; make install) used, and so on.

Fulfilling the GPL is just a minimum requirement.

Re: The current rules for making Emacs binaries available on the net?

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

David Reitter writes:

 > In my experience, binary distributions are not necessarily
 > productive in that sense.

But remember that an Emacs "binary" distribution usually contains
source Lisp[1], and coding Lisp is the most productive way for
newcomers to contribute (and some oldtimers, too, hello Drew! :-)
Even if they've never done it before; the Emacs C code is full of
strange constructs like DEFUN and redisplay and Mule and GCPRO, and
even experienced C hackers can get turned around in it.

Footnotes:

[1] I was disgusted to discover that Ubuntu packages for my Sharp
Netwalker don't contain source for XEmacs core Lisp.