Hi,
I'm just reviewing a DOSEmu package, where the package author includes a tarball of FreeDOS installation (binary images of a couple of basic DOS utilities, shell and the kernel). I believe that it's probably illegal (provided it's GPL code, I have not checked) to do this unless we distribute sources as well.
Would anyone mind if I told the maintainer just to include the source tarball in SRPM for now? Building the whole thing from source, while cleanly being possible, would add a huge amount of work at this point.
Thanks,
Lubomir Rintel wrote:
Hi,
I'm just reviewing a DOSEmu package, where the package author includes a tarball of FreeDOS installation (binary images of a couple of basic DOS utilities, shell and the kernel). I believe that it's probably illegal (provided it's GPL code, I have not checked) to do this unless we distribute sources as well.
Would anyone mind if I told the maintainer just to include the source tarball in SRPM for now? Building the whole thing from source, while cleanly being possible, would add a huge amount of work at this point.
Actually it is *not * possible to build freedos from source as this requires (or atleast used to) non free tools such as Borland C 3.
Which means that we should seriously consider wether we want to ship it at all.
And if start shipping it having diskimages for qemu would be a nice bonus to have :)
Regards,
Hans
On Mon, 2009-03-23 at 09:36 +0100, Hans de Goede wrote:
Lubomir Rintel wrote:
Hi,
I'm just reviewing a DOSEmu package, where the package author includes a tarball of FreeDOS installation (binary images of a couple of basic DOS utilities, shell and the kernel). I believe that it's probably illegal (provided it's GPL code, I have not checked) to do this unless we distribute sources as well.
Would anyone mind if I told the maintainer just to include the source tarball in SRPM for now? Building the whole thing from source, while cleanly being possible, would add a huge amount of work at this point.
Actually it is *not * possible to build freedos from source as this requires (or atleast used to) non free tools such as Borland C 3.
A brief search through the wiki [1] reveals that it might be possible to build it with Open Watcom C and nasm, though Open Watcom's license is unfortunatelly not allowed in Fedora :(
[1] http://apps.sourceforge.net/mediawiki/freedos/index.php?title=FreeDOS_Spec#P...
On Mon, Mar 23, 2009 at 07:47:54AM +0100, Lubomir Rintel wrote:
Hi,
I'm just reviewing a DOSEmu package, where the package author includes a tarball of FreeDOS installation (binary images of a couple of basic DOS utilities, shell and the kernel). I believe that it's probably illegal (provided it's GPL code, I have not checked) to do this unless we distribute sources as well.
Would anyone mind if I told the maintainer just to include the source tarball in SRPM for now? Building the whole thing from source, while cleanly being possible, would add a huge amount of work at this point.
IMHO, it must be buildable from source in Fedora before it is approved. If you ship a pre-built binary + source, there is no guarentee that the source being shipped actually matches the binary. If the build from source isn't possible using Fedora toolchain, then users would be unable to exercise their freedoms to rebuild the RPM.
There have been a few places in Fedora where we've had binary blobs in the past, but we've been striving to eliminate these and ensure everything is fully buildable from source with no blobs.
Daniel
On Mon, Mar 23, 2009 at 07:47:54AM +0100, Lubomir Rintel wrote:
Hi,
I'm just reviewing a DOSEmu package, where the package author includes a tarball of FreeDOS installation (binary images of a couple of basic DOS utilities, shell and the kernel). I believe that it's probably illegal (provided it's GPL code, I have not checked) to do this unless we distribute sources as well.
Would anyone mind if I told the maintainer just to include the source tarball in SRPM for now? Building the whole thing from source, while cleanly being possible, would add a huge amount of work at this point.
Just a note that I checked on Debian's package (dosemu[1] and dosemu-freedos) and they are also distributing the freedos binary.
According to their README file:
The files dosemu-freedos-*-bin.tgz and dosemu-freedos-*-sources.tgz, previously packaged in the separate Debian package dosemu-freedos, are also licensed under the GPL version 2, see above. However, they currently require non-free C compilers to build.
This still doesn't make it OK to distribute the binary without building from source IMO. We should get together with Debian and fix whatever problems are stopping us from building FreeDOS using Free tools.
Rich.
[1] http://packages.debian.org/source/sid/dosemu
Hi,
I'm just reviewing a DOSEmu package, where the package author includes a tarball of FreeDOS installation (binary images of a couple of basic DOS utilities, shell and the kernel). I believe that it's probably illegal (provided it's GPL code, I have not checked) to do this unless we distribute sources as well.
Following this, I decided to look at the source to see if it would be a trivial task to get the code running under gcc with nasm. It seems there are a couple of big problems.
1. The use of the FAR/far macros. These are a kickback to the old 16 bit days and as gcc doesn't have an 8086 backend, the closest I could find is Lambertsen's ia16 backend (from 2007). No idea if it'll do the job.
2. Next is the assembler bits. While nasm will compile 16 bit code, it's another pain in the backside to getting the source to build.
It might be just as wise to drop FreeDOS completely...
TTFN
Paul
On Wed, 2009-03-25 at 19:19 +0000, Paul wrote:
Hi,
I'm just reviewing a DOSEmu package, where the package author includes a tarball of FreeDOS installation (binary images of a couple of basic DOS utilities, shell and the kernel). I believe that it's probably illegal (provided it's GPL code, I have not checked) to do this unless we distribute sources as well.
Following this, I decided to look at the source to see if it would be a trivial task to get the code running under gcc with nasm. It seems there are a couple of big problems.
- The use of the FAR/far macros. These are a kickback to the old 16 bit
days and as gcc doesn't have an 8086 backend, the closest I could find is Lambertsen's ia16 backend (from 2007). No idea if it'll do the job.
What came to my mind here was dev86's bcc. I didn't even believe gcc compiles Intel 8086 code, though I've heard that it's used to compile Bochs BIOS, so... Anyways, I've not tried to get it to build with bcc, though I saw a mailing list post (I can't find it now) about it, that remained unanswered.
- Next is the assembler bits. While nasm will compile 16 bit code, it's
another pain in the backside to getting the source to build.
I thought they already use nasm for their builds. At least their wiki says so [1].
[1] http://apps.sourceforge.net/mediawiki/freedos/index.php?title=FreeDOS_Spec#P...
-- "Excuse all the blood" -- Dead
packaging@lists.fedoraproject.org
-
Daniel P. Berrange -
Hans de Goede -
Lubomir Rintel -
Paul F. Johnson -
Richard W.M. Jones