I want to come back to the question about the dependency of a source release on third-party tooling to be built.
There is some sort of principle involved when it comes to how others can build the source easily, even if only to confirm that it builds and operates. I would not want to see an Apache release that provides building on a significant explicitly-targeted platform exclusively via expensive commercial tools as the only means for directly confirming builds by an user of the release, a volunteer tester, some-one verifying the build, etc. I don't believe that is necessary for any project that I am aware of. In the odd case of Visual Studio, mentioned in the original question, I think the danger is that the developers will use a Professional or more-expensive version and not confirm that a free version is readily available and can be sufficient to accomplish all of the builds by limiting their development to use of the free version or at least confirming that the free version will build it. I would think that this is in the spirit of maturity-model clause CD30's "widely available standard tools." I would question any unnecessary dependence on tools that are a barrier to use by casual users and volunteer developers. - Dennis MUSINGS I see no reason that a podling with a small, new initial code base could rely on freely available tools, providing portable source code that can be easily built on and for different platforms by including platform-abstraction layers that suit that project's purposes and that otherwise satisfy requirements for Apache releases. TLPs, such as Apache OpenOffice, where Microsoft Windows is a crucial target platform, have greater difficulty when the project-specified versions of the Visual C++ compiler and essential platform libraries (including redistributable run-time) predate the current comprehensive, freely-available versions. This is a different challenge with historical origins in a legacy code base. -----Original Message----- From: Greg Stein [mailto:gst...@gmail.com] Sent: Thursday, August 6, 2015 02:13 To: general@incubator.apache.org; ro...@shaposhnik.org Subject: Re: third party tooling. On Thu, Aug 6, 2015 at 2:25 AM, Bertrand Delacretaz <bdelacre...@apache.org> wrote: > On Thu, Aug 6, 2015 at 1:57 AM, Roman Shaposhnik <ro...@shaposhnik.org> > wrote: > > ...you can call yourself open source software all you want, > > but unless you get an exception from Fedora Packaging Committee > > you are not open enough for the distribution to consider your work... > > But that's doesn't make your project invalid or useless. > Right. I don't know where you're coming from Roman, but the Foundation doesn't require our projects to be built via "bootsrappable [sic] from source using *only* open source software binaries as the input". Never has, never will. So to Jan's original question: totally fine, no issues with compiler dependencies for certain platforms. Our software is defined by ALv2 and the "Category" licenses for dependencies. [ ... ] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
