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Re: [XBoard-devel] Installer


From: Tim Mann
Subject: Re: [XBoard-devel] Installer
Date: Mon, 24 Aug 2009 22:31:10 -0700

On Mon, 24 Aug 2009 19:42:02 -0600, Eric Mullins <address@hidden> wrote:
> Perhaps I'm just being pedantic about this issue.  Nobody else seems to 
> care-- at least I haven't seen anyone else who's concerned about it.

I'm not too sure what the problem is here.  We had a discussion about
what should be included in the WinBoard self-installer before you
joined the project, Eric, and as far as I know, everyone was fine with
what HG wanted to include in it.  I know I was, at least as far as I
understood it.  Not that my opinion outweighs anyone else's, but here's
my two cents...

My experience with WinBoard has always been that a lot of the potential
users are newbies, and most of the rest really don't want to spend a
lot of time downloading and installing multiple packages in order to
get to the point where they can play some chess.  That's why I made a
self-installer for WinBoard in the first place (instead of just
distributing a zip file) and why it has always included some other
essential software.

The other software in the self-installer has not always been GPL.
There is no legal requirement for it all to be GPL, and I personally am
not a GPL fanatic or someone that feels the project has to exclusively
promote Richard Stallman's vision of free software.  I do have a strong
preference for choosing to include only things that are freely
redistributable in source form under either the GPL or some other
reasonable license.  I made an exception for timestamp and timeseal
because they are much needed, they are slightly less insecure with the
source being hidden, and the ICC and FICS operators asked me to keep
the source hidden.

On the engine front, historically, at first only GNU chess was
included.  At first it was the only engine that worked with
xboard/WinBoard!  The last time the installer was redone (for WinBoard
4.2.7b), the person who made the new installer (Mark Ioli) chose to add
Crafty too.  I didn't ask for that, but I thought it was OK, as
Crafty's license permitted people to build binaries and distribute
them.  I personally think it's fine to change to different engines now,
as long as they are freely redistributable.

Are any of the engines or other software that are proposed to be
included closed source, freely distributable only in binary form, or
distributable by us only because their author gave us special
permission?  That would be legal, but would be against my preference
(except for timestamp and timeseal).

For obvious software engineering reasons, we need to keep everything
that we use to build the installer under version control.  This is the
only reasonable way we can, for example, rebuild the installation
package later to fix an issue in a specific component without
unintentionally changing versions or losing another component, or debug
an issue that a user reports which may have been perturbed in a newer
version of the component they are having trouble with, such that we
can't reproduce it there (even though it may still be a bug).

It's hard for me to imagine something that we would have permission to
put into the self-installer but would not have permission to check into
our git repository.  Of course timestamp and timeseal are a special
case where we can't make the source public.  We should at least check
the binaries we use into git.

Hmm, did I send anyone the source for the timestamp and timeseal that
we use?  I have it, but as I mentioned, I was asked to keep it private,
so I only checked the binaries into our old public CVS repository.
Probably Arun should have a copy too since he's the official co-maintainer.

-- 
Tim Mann  address@hidden  http://tim-mann.org/




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