Re: ttn-pers-scheme & ttn-do

[Thien-Thi Nguyen <ttn@gnuvola.org>]

() Sebastian Tennant <sebyte@smolny.plus.com>
() Wed, 19 Mar 2008 13:08:37 +0200

   What was this special exception and was it the reason for the fork?

The fork was over deprecation of some libguile API elements, plus
administrative snafu.  The special exception can be seen in some Guile
releases in the top-level README:

|Guile License =========================================================
|
|The license of Guile consists of the GNU GPL plus a special statement
|giving blanket permission to link with non-free software.  This is the
|license statement as found in any individual file that it applies to:
|
| This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
| it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
| the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option)
| any later version.
|
| This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
| but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
| MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
| GNU General Public License for more details.
|
| You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
| along with this software; see the file COPYING.  If not, write to
| the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor,
| Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.
|
| As a special exception, the Free Software Foundation gives permission
| for additional uses of the text contained in its release of GUILE.
|
| The exception is that, if you link the GUILE library with other files
| to produce an executable, this does not by itself cause the
| resulting executable to be covered by the GNU General Public License.
| Your use of that executable is in no way restricted on account of
| linking the GUILE library code into it.
|
| This exception does not however invalidate any other reasons why
| the executable file might be covered by the GNU General Public License.
|
| This exception applies only to the code released by the
| Free Software Foundation under the name GUILE.  If you copy
| code from other Free Software Foundation releases into a copy of
| GUILE, as the General Public License permits, the exception does
| not apply to the code that you add in this way.  To avoid misleading
| anyone as to the status of such modified files, you must delete
| this exception notice from them.
|
| If you write modifications of your own for GUILE, it is your choice
| whether to permit this exception to apply to your modifications.
| If you do not wish that, delete this exception notice.

   Good luck.  I'd be very interested to know a little more about the
   politics e.t.c.... perhaps off-list?.. even though you describe the fork
   as amicable.

Here's my recollection of events: in 2000-2001, i was granted write
privs to the Guile cvs repo (after assigning past and future changes to
Guile to the FSF).  I did an uncontroversial (v.small change) 1.4.1
release and wanted to continue 1.4.x hacking on a (cvs) branch, w/ aims
to ease migration of existing code to the then-WIP libguile API changes.
In discussion on the emacs-devel list, i was not able to convince anyone
of the merit of this goal (the overall response was: "we are changing
the API, you must change your code").

I took umbrage at this and unsubscribed from emacs-devel, declaring
loyalty to the users (and OPC (other-people's code) that might not (be
able to) change), and announced intention of continuing to hack on 1.4.1
on a cvs branch anyway.  The cvs admin declared my actions a danger to
the project and revoked write privs.  Lacking that repo to save changes,
i started hacking locally and have been since.

So i see 1.4.x not really so much a fork as a long-lived non-local
branch.  Now that there is new Guile maintainership, i think it would be
a good idea to merge some of the good stuff from that branch into the
trunk.  Git supports branches much better than cvs, so there is now even
less reason for the shutout.

If anyone else recalls things differently, feel free and tell it like
you see / saw it.  My memory is often faulty and there is no doubt i
missed some details.

   Just tried building ttn-do.  Configure ran OK, but make borked:

    guile-tools c2x -o expat.x expat.c
    /usr/bin/guile-tools: no such program: /usr/share/guile/1.8/scripts/c2x

   So I suppose it's a case once again of requiring 1.4.x rather than 1.8.x

Yes.

   It does seem a shame to me that your numerous contributions to the
   Guile code base find themselves effectively sidelined to your own
   distribution.

I didn't whack my write privs, but i'm not ashamed of what i've done
since that event.  We all cope as best we can.

thi