On Thu, Aug 13, 2015 at 09:39:48PM +0100, Peter Maydell wrote: > On 13 August 2015 at 19:27, Eric Blake <ebl...@redhat.com> wrote: > > It's worth asking the gnulib folks for an opinion on whether relaxing > > the license on maint.mk and GNUmakefile to explicitly go back to GPLv2+, > > and/or explicitly add some explicit exception clause like gcc that makes > > it clear that using these files to build does not taint the built > > product. Personally, I see no problem with using GPLv3'd tools (after > > all, qemu requires GPLv3 GNU make, and gcc is also GPLv3 although clang > > can step around that one), but I also see your reluctance of even having > > a file in the qemu.git repo that has a GPLv3 clause. > > Right; we don't ship make or gcc in our code repo, and using > external-to-the-repository tools which happen to be GPLv3 is > obviously fine. Similarly, if you used the maint.mk script externally > as a tool which allowed you to find bugs which you submitted > patches to fix that wouldn't be a problem. I just don't want > a GPLv3-licensed file in the git repo and an integrated part > of our build-and-test system...
Ok, I certainly understand why we can't have GPLv3 code built into QEMU, but I thought build-system tests would be ok because it does not affect the built binaries in any way. > I would certainly appreciate a maint.mk with a GPLv2-or-later > license. Our other options are (a) use the last v2+ version > (which is what we do with our binutils disassemblers) > (b) do the style checks we care about some other way or > (c) don't bother doing the style checks at all. Option (b) could involve re-factoring the existing check_patch.pl script to give us the 2 main benefits from the gnulib check code - Ability to turn on/off individual rules on a per-file basis - Ability to run against the entire codebase not just patches IIUC, the check_patch.pl script was imported from Linux, so I'm not sure if there is a general desire to minimize the divergance from the original file, or whether refactoring would be welcome ? I can certainly explore the viability of such an approach if people are conceptually open to some significant changes to check_patch.pl Regards, Daniel -- |: http://berrange.com -o- http://www.flickr.com/photos/dberrange/ :| |: http://libvirt.org -o- http://virt-manager.org :| |: http://autobuild.org -o- http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ :| |: http://entangle-photo.org -o- http://live.gnome.org/gtk-vnc :|
