[openbeos] Re: Haiku distro guidelines [was: Haiku VmwareBuild Environment]


Am 17.04.2008 um 15:00 schrieb Ingo Weinhold:

On 2008-04-16 at 20:44:00 [+0200], "Jorge G. Mare (aka Koki)"
<koki@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


Would it be of any help if I repackaged the optional packages in
haiku-files.org to include their respective license text files? That's 
something that even I can and would be willing to do.
Currently the optional package zips are just unzipped to some place on the image (/boot/home for the ported stuff). So the license would end up there, too. I'd rather have a final solution, like the one I've proposed. If we can agree on that and on a simple file format for those copyright/ license descriptions, then the creation and addition of those files would be most 
welcome. I was thinking of a format like this:

Package:                FooBar
Version:                7.3
Copyright:              1973 - 2007, John Foo, Muesli Bar
Description: The incredible FooBar package, always handy for examples -- 
                                even multiline examples, which AboutSystem 
should format
                                properly.
License:                GNU GPL v2
URL:                    http://foobar.example.com
The license name would refer to an equally named file in /etc/ licenses/. To 
avoid conflicts, the name of the file in a optional package should be
".OptionalPackageDescription", added to the zip file without path name.
Unless there are objections or someone else wants to do that, I'll prepare the build system and AboutSystem to eat those files later today or maybe 
tomorrow.
Now I'm really confused! Currently these Optional Packages are only available to developers, building their own images. Does this move of yours mean you want to turn Haiku itself into a distribution, with its own official run-time package system and format? 

If yes, then you shouldn't do this in such a hurry.
If no, then there will be a much simpler solution: Not knowing Jam I'm pretty sure this info could be specified inside the Optional Package definitions in their Jamfiles and be collected at build-time, whether concatenated to a file or stored as attributes. No new metadata text format describing more than needed to display the copyright info in AboutSystem would be necessary in that case.
Btw including a file of fixed name in the zip file which is, as you say, being unzipped to the image sounds like it would get overridden by the next package. Jars do have the fixed META-INF folder, but they're not usually being unzipped, especially not to the same folder.
Also while I agree that adding the copyrights to the AboutSystem app is right, I'd like to throw in whether Linuces actually do that? I don't really think we should worry too much about the Optional Packages as such; more important would be making the developer adding such Optional Packages to her image aware of their licenses. Currently, the unzipping of the Optional Packages appears to be one of the last things done for building an image, so maybe that could show a short message on their license? (e.g. "Unzipping Firefox.zip... (MPL)") 

Andreas

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