On Fri, Jan 05, 2001 at 09:42:44AM -0500, Andy Dougherty wrote:
> On Fri, 5 Jan 2001, Bradley M. Kuhn wrote:
>
> > I personally think that the relying on LGPL'ed code is completely
> > reasonable. Some will disagree, so we need to come to a consensus on this
> > as a community.
>
> There are actually a couple of different mostly-independent issues, but
> yes, we'll need to face them seriously fairly early on, I think. (Not just
> yet, perhaps, but probably soon.)
>
> 1. What are the consequences for those who redistribute software based on
> or including perl6? This is a licensing issue that I do not feel
If we botch this, this is the point that may stop commercial vendors
from including Perl in their core distribution, or even building upon
Perl (as Alan^WSun has already made with Solaris 8 and kstat(1)).
> competent to address, and hence won't.
>
> 2. How do we handle build/install issues?
>
> a. Do we insist that users install the package first? If so, what do we
> do about portability problems? For example, gmp (the GNU multiprecision
> arithmetic library that's at issue here) hasn't been ported to VMS (at
> least last time I checked) while VMS is a supported platform for perl.
This is also a biggie. I do not think insisting would be a winning
solution. Even if the software has been ported to platform
<mumbletyspratz>, any additional piece of software one has to install
raises the bar of installing Perl. And, if there's no port of a library
<blah> to <mumbletyspratz>, the bar will be even higher. "Let's then
just port <blah> to <mumbletyspratz>" just isn't a realistic suggestion.
There are far too many blah-mumbletysptraz combinations out there.
Everything needs to be optional.
--
$jhi++; # http://www.iki.fi/jhi/
# There is this special biologist word we use for 'stable'.
# It is 'dead'. -- Jack Cohen
