[arch-dev-public] GPL Compliance: A beginning

[Jan de Groot]

On Wed, 2008-05-21 at 15:49 -0500, Aaron Griffin wrote:
> So, yeah people are blowing smoke about this hosting the sources
> thing. That's fine, it's a legit violation...
> 
> I made a little script which should generate some of these things...
> I'm testing it now, as it's not fully "live" just yet:
> http://dev.archlinux.org/~aaron/sources/
> 
> Here's something neat which is an added bonus: any one of these things
> can be used to build the entire package when offline. Download the
> src.tar.gz, extract, and makepkg.
> 
> One big lingering issue: do we need different source tarballs for each
> arch? My instincts tell me yes, for a few reasons:
> * I recall some PKGBUILDs having CARCH based 'if's around the sources
> * Some packages are only in one arch or another
> 
> Does anyone know of a way to solve this... I don't want to bloat the
> disk usage for a few special cases? mayeb md5sum and symlink?

I don't see the need for per-arch source tarballs. Sure, there's
inconsistency between architectures (epiphany 2.22.0 in i686 vs 2.22.2.1
in x86_64 for example), but that would mean two source packages, as we
have two different binary packages. The script could omit the
architecture and only create a package for amd64 if there isn't exactly
the same package for i686 already.

The only packages I know that have checks for CARCH around sources are
swt (which is not GPL anyways) and some binary non-free things that are
built for a specific architecture. As these binary blobs aren't GPL
either (and redistribution rules are questionable), I guess we won't see
this much around.