Re: pending interval-3.0.0 release

[Oliver Heimlich]

On 20.08.2017 21:27, Oliver Heimlich wrote:
> On 20.08.2017 20:47, Olaf Till wrote:
>> On Sun, Aug 20, 2017 at 11:00:41AM +0200, Oliver Heimlich wrote:
>>> I have now put the generated test data under version control and it is
>>> possible to run the package from source or make a release tarball
>>> without these special dependencies.

>> ... These sources could be the corresponding .tst files, which currently
>> are only temporary files during the build. But though they are
>> editable, it's their .itl sources which are meant to be edited. We
>> distribute these .itl sources. The problem with this is that the tool
>> for converting .itl to .tst is not in standard distributions (?), but
>> only in an external repo. I think if we distribute the .itl files, we
>> also must distribute the conversion tool (and not rely on its
>> availability in an external repo). I am not a lawyer, but as long as
>> we distribute the package with no commercial intent, it could suffice
>> to clone the external repo at Octave Forge and to put a hint into the
>> distributed package where the tool is available at Octave Forge.

> That external tool (and the .itl files) is meant to be used by interval
> arithmetic library developers to share the test data.  It is a very
> specific use case, which is unique in the Octave community and maybe
> affects only a few dozen users worldwide.  I guess you won't find that
> tool largerly redistributed.

The GPL FAQ is an interesting read on that topic.  According to the FAQ
it suffices to put links to the external repository, see
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#SourceAndBinaryOnDifferentSites
and https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#SourceInCVS

The remaining questions are:
 - Do we believe that Github will be available while we distribute the
software on Octave Forge?  If Github closes its service, we may still
clone that repository.
 - Do we believe that the repository might be deleted and vanish some
day?  Then we would want to clone it to have a backup.

Oliver