Re: patches to give colorized file listings

Re: patches to give colorized file listings

[Bruce Stephens]

I like it, but there are a couple of things I don't like.

The technical one is that it seems to depend on the listtypes option,
so I can either have colours and characters indicating the types, or
characters indicating the types, or nothing.  I'd like to be able to
have just colours.

The other one is an IPR problem: it uses the patch that gives the GNU
fileutils package colourized ls (included in the latest fileutils), so
what's the copyright position on this?  Personally, I don't care, but I
thought some people wanted to keep zsh from being infected with the
GPL?

--
Bruce Stephens			| email: B.Stephens@math.ruu.nl
Utrecht University              | telephone: +31 30 2534630
Department of Mathematics       | telefax:   +31 30 2518394
P.O. Box 80010, 3508 TA Utrecht |
The Netherlands                 |

Re: patches to give colorized file listings

[Greg J. Badros]

On Thu, 22 Aug 1996, Bruce Stephens wrote:

> I like it, but there are a couple of things I don't like.
> 
> The technical one is that it seems to depend on the listtypes option,
> so I can either have colours and characters indicating the types, or
> characters indicating the types, or nothing.  I'd like to be able to
> have just colours.

This is pretty doable, but since I use file types I attacked that side
first to see what other snags came up... few did, so I went forward.  I
can easily add the code to both parts, or better, factor it out and make
it a little bit cleaner, too. 

> The other one is an IPR problem: it uses the patch that gives the GNU
> fileutils package colourized ls (included in the latest fileutils), so
> what's the copyright position on this?  Personally, I don't care, but I
> thought some people wanted to keep zsh from being infected with the
> GPL?

I looked through the color-ls patch, and have no idea what their copy
policy is.  My distribution of the patch is a single gz file, so it's hard
to say.  I've not been following the group long enough to know about a
history of GPL infection fright. :-)  It's actually not that complicated
an ordeal, but I don't believe in reinventing the wheel, plus it'd be
confusing if zsh colorized listing worked differently that ls's.  Anybody
know more about color-ls?

> 
> --
> Bruce Stephens			| email: B.Stephens@math.ruu.nl

Greg J. Badros
gjb@cs.duke.edu

Re: patches to give colorized file listings

[Bruce Stephens]

> On Thu, 22 Aug 1996, Bruce Stephens wrote:

> > The technical one is that it seems to depend on the listtypes option,
> > so I can either have colours and characters indicating the types, or
> > characters indicating the types, or nothing.  I'd like to be able to
> > have just colours.
> 
> This is pretty doable, but since I use file types I attacked that side
> first to see what other snags came up... few did, so I went forward.  I
> can easily add the code to both parts, or better, factor it out and make
> it a little bit cleaner, too. 

Factoring it out is clearly the Right Thing.

[GPL or not]

> I looked through the color-ls patch, and have no idea what their copy
> policy is.  My distribution of the patch is a single gz file, so it's hard
> to say.  I've not been following the group long enough to know about a
> history of GPL infection fright. :-)

The patch started as a Linux thing (and I don't know what policy it
had).  It's been adopted into fileutils now, so presumably if you used
the changes in that, that would be GPLed.  That leaves uncertain what
the patch you used has.  Probably the best thing to do is to see if
enough people like the idea, and then ask the FSF for permission to use
it: it's not a big bit of code, and zsh is free software, even if not
quite as free as they might like, but I'm reasonably sure they'd agree.

> It's actually not that complicated
> an ordeal, but I don't believe in reinventing the wheel, plus it'd be
> confusing if zsh colorized listing worked differently that ls's.  Anybody
> know more about color-ls?

I agree with all of this, and personally I don't care whether zsh is
GPLed or not.  But if others *do* care, then I'd like the patch to be
GPL free also, so that it can be adopted into the core distribution.
Otherwise I'm left with patching it myself every time I update zsh.

Re: patches to give colorized file listings

[Zefram]

>                                                              it'd be
>confusing if zsh colorized listing worked differently that ls's.

Then reimplement from spec.  It's not difficult to duplicate the
functionality without copying code.

-zefram