Re: patches to give colorized file listings

[Bruce Stephens <stephens@math.ruu.nl>]

> 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.