Re: News about the macro archive

[Tom Howard]

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Hi Peter,

> I was wondering whether you have some sort of idea how many
> people have responded regard the re-licensing already? I saw
> quite a few postings, but I can't tell how many percent of
> all contributors that were so far.

I've had 42 responses so far, out for about 60 that were sent out.  I'm
in the process of updating the licence information for the ones I've
received permission to change.

The only person I have not been able to contact (All email attempts
bounce) is Mark Elbrecht.  address@hidden is the latest email
address I can find for him.

> Anyway, if you update your 'ac-archive' tree, you'll see
> that I have converted all macros to the "new" format now.
> All keywords are in place now. The value of @license
> defaulted to "GPLWithACException", so if you want to change
> any of the macros' states already, just edit that to say
> 
>   @license AllPermissive
>
> instead.
>

I've actually been putting

dnl
dnl @license
dnl   Copying and distribution of this file, with or without
dnl   modification, are permitted in any medium without
dnl   royalty provided the copyright notice and this notice
dnl   are preserved.
dnl

The reason for this is (as you pointed out) some people are using the
macros directly from CVS, so we must ensure that they receive complete
licence information with each file (i.e. either the all permissive
statement or a more verbose GPL with exception statement).

I know this represents a redundancy in that the licence is repeated in
each m4 file, but that is pretty much normal for source files.  For
instance in another project I work on we use the following header for
all out files

/***************************************************************************
                                <FILENAME>
                             -------------------
                                <DESC>
    begin                : <START DATE>
    copyright            : (C) <YEAR> by <ORGANISATION>
    email                : <EMAIL_ADDRESS>
 ***************************************************************************/

/***************************************************************************
 *                                                                         *
 *   This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify  *
 *   it under the terms of the GNU LGPL as published by the Free Software  *
 *   Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any  *
 *   later version.                                                        *
 *                                                                         *
 ***************************************************************************/

I'm yet to commit any m4 changes and when I do, I'll do it in a branch
as I want to make sure firstly that the way I've don the licence is OK
with you and secondly that it doesn't break the documentation generator.

Also, I noticed that the all permissive licence refers to a copyright
statement, but currently there is no copyright statement in the files.
I suggest we change

dnl @author <NAMES>

dnl @copyright <YEAR>
dnl     <NAMES>

to fix this.  What do you think.

> I'm about to write a document that explains all the bells
> and whistles of the format, but I think it is all pretty
> intuitive anyway.

Cool.

> I hope you are pleased to hear that I have one kick-ass
> "axlint" tool ready to share. The tool reads the m4
> description, does lots of consistency checks, and dumps a
> pretty-printed canonical version of the file back out. If
> you are willing to install something so that you can run
> Haskell code, I'll send you the source code.
> 
> The simplest solution is to interpret the language:
> 
>   http://haskell.org/hugs/
> 
> You can also compile it, but the compiler is fairly large:
> 
>   http://haskell.org/ghc/
> 
> Let me know if you are interested. The setup is pretty
> simple.

That's really cool, but here is my concern.  Ideally it would be great
for the average everyday user to be able to grab the code from cvs, and
when they run make it would generate the docs for them.  We should be
able to do this with axlint, but it would require that same average user
to have haskell installed.  Personally if it was up to me and just for
me I would use ruby, but it also faces the same problem as haskell
(average user doesn't have it installed).

What do you think if we do something based on gendocs.pl (I'm willing to
put in the hard yards, so don't feel overburdened :) )?  Most users have
perl installed (actually I think automake is written in perl), so it
would mean that most users would be able to generate docs themselves.  I
think this would be particularly useful, if they are creating their own
or updating existing macros, as they could check the html output before
they submit.  What do you reckon?

Cheers,

- --
Tom Howard

Public Key: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x433B299A
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