I'm still on holiday, but saw this and thought I'd join in.
> Malcolm, how do you feel about this? Are we able to link cpphs as a
> library statically to GHC?
Sure, I'll happily add a static-linking exception to the LGPL for cpphs,
so you can use it directly within ghc as a library, rather than piping
through a separate binary. However I'm honestly not sure whether
library or binary is the better policy in this case. Since re-linking
ghc against a replacement cpphs library is (in all likelihood) going to
be rather more difficult for the average user than merely exchanging a
binary, their ability to take separate advantage of bugfixes in cpphs in
between releases of ghc might be impaired by the library route. Even
though cpphs is pretty complete and stable, there have been several
bugfixes (for somewhat obscure corner cases) even during the last few
months.
> Remember that *we* may understand the LGPL (or at least claim to :-), but
> not all potential users of GHC are in this situation, and some will have to
> expend resources (time and money) to determine whether they are able to use
> or modify GHC safely, and retain the rights they need over the output that
> GHC generates.
Without wanting to start (another) licensing war, it is worth noting
that the (L)GPL is one of the most widely used and understood software
licences in the world. Surely not much of an extra imposition for
company lawyers, given that (if I have understood correctly) the
technical context here is using GHC in conjunction with a Microsoft C
compiler as a backend, and MS is famed (is that the right word?) for the
clarity of its own licences. :-)
> But nobody else seems to care about this, I haven't seen any
> authors of Haskell LGPL libraries complain that users can't easily comply
> with it. I suppose the re-linking requirement isn't as critical
Many Haskell LGPL libraries already employ the same static-linking
exception that wxWidgets pioneered.
Regards,
Malcolm
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