Re: [xmlroff] Re: Debian xmlroff package

[Tony G. <Ton...@Su...>]

Please either subscribe or post from the address from which you subscribed.

Oliver Kiddle <ok...@ya...> writes:
> I wrote:
>> I maintain one other Debian package so could try to produce one for
>> xmlroff if nobody else is planning to do it.
>
> I've just had a look at what it would involve.
>
> PangoXSL appears to be released under the GPL and, if my understanding

That surprised me, so I checked.

In my definitive PangoXSL workspace, COPYING was a link to
/usr/share/automake-1.8/COPYING.  There was no COPYING in CVS.  I have now
checked in the LGPL licence.

I conclude that there wasn't a COPYING file the first time that I ran the
autotools so automake helpfully provided one without my noticing.  Talk about
viral licensing.

The 'pangopdf' project on SourceForge has always been listed as LGPL.

> is correct, that means that xmlroff can't be linked against it unless it
> to was released under the GPL. Would it perhaps make sense to re-licence
> PangoXSL under the LGPL. Apart from anything else, that could help
> achieve the stated objective of PangoXSL - to be merged with Pango -
> given that Pango itself is released under the LGPL.

The previous inclusion of GPL license text was an administrative oversight.

> I think the strange nuclear clause in the xmlroff licence is not a
> problem for Debian inclusion assuming that the intention is to disclaim
> warranty rather than to discriminate against people running nuclear
> facilities by not letting them use the software. I'll need to check on
> this, though.

The "strange nuclear clause" is in the BSD-style license under which Sun
released xmlroff to open source.

> Does PangoXSL's configure script need to check for libxml2? The library

Probably not.  It may be a hangover from either PangoPDF or xmlroff.

> doesn't appear to actually link to libxml2. Also, make distclean should
> remove config.log and it'd be nice if the config.guess and config.sub
> files were updated with newer versions.
>
> Anyway, an initial package for pangoxsl is at:
>   http://www.geocities.com/okiddle/pangoxsl.zip
> Would be good if anyone has a chance to look at it and see if they can
> make any improvements. Sorry for using zip - geocities is fussy. The zip
> file contains the package source and i386 .debs.

I don't use Debian, so I'm no use for checking it.

Regards,


Tony.