xgettext (Re: replication of stuff in /usr/gnu)

[Nicolas Williams]

On Thu, Jul 12, 2007 at 01:21:45PM -0700, Alan Coopersmith wrote:
> Darren.Reed at Sun.COM wrote:
> >Why is GPLv3 relevant here?  texinfo (upon which xgettext is
> >built) has recently been updated to GPLv3 and it seems reasonable
> >that other tools, such as xgettext (which is clearly related) will
> >follow soon.
> >
> >Junking the Solaris version of xgettext may leave us with a hole
> >that cannot be filled when xgettext finally moves to GPLv3 if we
> >are unwilling to accept GPLv3 packages.
> 
> That's simply a matter of license review, same as we do for all the
> GPLv2, Apache, BSD/MIT, and other externally licensed components we
> bring in.   I don't know that GPLv3 would be really any different
> there, though the lawyers will need to tell us that for sure.

Exactly.  Also, as long as GPLv3 doesn't "infect" (please, hold the
flames) consumers of CLIs then there's no reason whatsoever to think
that Legal wouldn't approve inclusion of an GPLv3'ed xgettext.

OTOH, we could not replace Solaris' libintl with GNU's because of the
GPL (since it "infects" API dependents in a way that does not apply to
CLIs).

We have a GPLv2 xgettext, it's already included in a product shipped by
Sun (the S10 CCD), and we already use it for internal development.  In
the unimaginable case that a future GPLv3'ed version of xgettext could
not possibly be included in Solaris we should be as happy to support the
current GPLv2 version of xgettext as we are to support the non-GNU
xgettext that lives in /usr/bin/.  A future version of xgettext licensed
under the GPLv3 would not and could not revoke the use of the GPLv2 for
the current GNU xgettext.

We aren't lawyers, but some things just aren't that hard.  There really
is no reason not to file an OSR (unless the existing one covers
inclusion of xgettext in Solaris) and integrate (probably into the SFW
consolidation).

The only issue is who will do the work.  I looked and building xgettext
is somewhat non-trivial: it has a pair of internal libraries (which we
could link in statically) and it depends on a GNU libintl (which we
could link in statically or which we could place in /usr/gnu/lib; we
could not replace Solaris' libintl with GNU's because of of the GPL).
Aside from this building xgettext is simple, and integrating it into the
SFW consolidation should be simple as well.

Nico
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