Re: GFDL/GPL issues

[Basile Starynkevitch <basile at starynkevitch dot net>]

On Tue, 2010-05-25 at 17:44 -0700, Mark Mitchell wrote:
> In a biweekly call with the other GCC Release Managers, I was asked
> today on the status of the SC/FSF discussions re. GFDL/GPL issues.  In
> particular, the question of whether or not we can use "literate
> programming" techniques to extract documentation from code and take bits
> of what is currently in GCC manuals and put that into comments in code
> and so forth and so on.
[...]
> 
> Therefore, if I don't have an update "soon" (within a week or two), I'd
> suggest that we operate under the assumption that it will not be
> possible to combine GFDL manuals and GPL code in the near future.

I am already doing that within the GCC MELT branch. Detailed
explanations have been given in my email of May 7th
http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2010-05/msg00125.html

To be more precise

* all the MELT documentation have been written only by me (Basile).

* There is a chapter melt.texi devoted to MELT. It is hand written.

* The MELT infrastructure provides a syntax (:doc annotation) to add
documentation into definitions (of MELT functions, classes, primitives,
matchers, ...). The MELT infrastructure also provides a mode (a way of
running GCC MELT) to generate this documentation (from gcc/melt/*melt
source files) as a meltgendoc.texi in the build dir. So this generated
doc is another chapter of the documentation: gccint.texi has both
@include melt.texi & @include meltgendoc.texi

Actually, I believe that for MELT as a gcc-4.5 plugin, the two files
melt.texi (handwritten) & meltgendoc.texi (generated from *.melt source
files) constitute the documentation.

So what should I do?

a. ignore Mark Mitchell suggestion since GCC MELT is a branch, not the
official trunk.

b. scrap all the documentation & the documentation generator. This is
not good news - even if the documentation is incomplete, I did put a lot
of efforts inside... And MELT cannot be used without any documentation
(and this documentation, even imperfect & incomplete, is the best I have
today)

c. change the licenses of the melt*texi files [I certainly won't do that
without explicit approval] to something compatible. Perhaps the fact
that I am the only contributor to these files might help.

BTW, I intend to make a first release of MELT as a plugin in a few
weeks, not in a few years. This mostly means for me publishing the .tgz
file of all the MELT files as collected by the existing
contrib/make-melt-source-tar.sh script.

Cheers.




-- 
Basile STARYNKEVITCH         http://starynkevitch.net/Basile/
email: basile<at>starynkevitch<dot>net mobile: +33 6 8501 2359
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*** opinions {are only mines, sont seulement les miennes} ***