Re: Copyright/license issues (was: [COMMIT] sign & encrypt changes)

[Amos Gouaux <amos+lists.ding@utdallas.edu>]

>>>>> On Mon, 06 May 2002 11:55:04 -0700,
>>>>> Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu> (ra) writes:

ra> And package management systems make life hard for people like me, who are
ra> trying to maintain a central software installation in an unusual file
ra> system like AFS.  They mostly assume that you can just blithely install
ra> stuff into the compiled-in paths, which of course isn't true in AFS which
ra> requires one to install into a different location and then release.

We don't use AFS, but structure things somewhat similarly with a
twisted mixture of tools.  For the most part it makes deploying
software on a large scale more convenient, especially backing out a
boo-boo.  However, I concur that package systems can at times make
this a horrible hell to cope with.

(Seems ironic.  Long ago I wished that all software would use
autoconf so that I could easily set the "prefix" Makefile var during
"make install".  Gradually, this became more and more common as
time went by.  But HO!  Now there are all these package environments 
that require even more fiddling.  Funny how things improve to be
more flexible.  Alas, I digress way too much.)

ra> I really like XEmacs (much better than Emacs) from an installation
ra> perspective, but that's not because of the packaging system.  That's
ra> because the sumo tarballs have considerably more stuff bundled than the
ra> Emacs, which reduces the amount of stuff I have to hunt down separately
ra> and install myself.  I often don't even bother because building is too
ra> much of a pain, which means that XEmacs users have more Lisp packages
ra> available than Emacs users.

To be honest, this was one of the reasons why I've been primarily
using XEmacs for the last couple of years after virtually growing up
on Emacs.  Very convenient indeed.  And because of the package
structure, it was pretty easy to script the removal of things that
we didn't necessarily want to deploy.

ra> It would be really cool if someone would put together a Sumo equivalent
ra> for Emacs containing the stuff that has unclear licensing that the FSF
ra> can't ship with Emacs itself.

Not only that, but Emacs itself (yeah, topic for another list I'm sure)....

-- 
Amos