OK - _I_ personally understand an EXEPACKER as a "kind of delivery", like InstallShield, ZIP, and the like. [...] you must ship all modules, tools, etc,pp, to re-built Program!! [...] So, if you distribute the sources to built the Program, the reciever can re-built a functionally 100% identical Program.
Aren't ZIP archives a form of delivery then? What if I used PKZIP, not InfoZIP to create them? Do I have to distribute PKZIP source code then? Please note that PKZIP -ex and ZIP -9 don't generate identical compressed data, so it's not possible to substitute PKZIP by ZIP. So?!
If the "form of delivery" matters as well, how about ship an "unarchiver" with your program (an un-aPack'er); that unarchives the exepack'ed program?
Even though UPX can unpack executables packed with it, this is not true for the DOS kernel, as we modify the EXE file header so it's no longer such. aPack can't even unpack executables packed with it. So this would be double-impossible. What about distributing a disassembler or debugger or generic unpacker like IUP or UPC then? I think that we come to an absurd here.
When I talked about "combining" and "aggregation", I meant this excerpt from the GPL:
In addition, mere aggregation of another work not based on the Program with the Program (or with a work based on the Program) on a volume of a storage or distribution medium does not bring the other work under the scope of this License.
I argued that coexistence of data, stub and and header is "mere aggregation", just like combining files in a ZIP file or in a diskette. The executable or archive can be regarded as a container or distribution medium too (remember "multi-volume" archives). I don't think that only disks can be regarded as "distribution mediums", but also archives and files. The difference isn't big here. The important point is whether the parts interact with each other, and you already know that for the stub, the data is just compressed data and nothing else - it doesn't care what it does at all.
Lucho
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