Patch to update gperf URLs in Makefiles

[Joseph S. Myers]

On Mon, 16 Oct 2000, Jeffrey A Law wrote:

> Even though 2.95.2 doesn't print the magic message, we need somewhere we
> can point folks to so that they can get an updated copy of gperf.
> 
> *If* there is a gcc-2.95.3 release, then it might make sense to makes sure
> the Makefile stuff prints a suitable message :-)

That somewhere should be ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/gperf/ which the
mainline Makefiles now point to - rather than needing a separate copy of a
slightly broken version (the patch didn't update the expected test output,
so the gperf testsuite failed with the egcs version) when the current
released GNU version includes the option needed for GCC.

>   >  and I suppose no-one cares to deal with the
>   > political issues of the VCG distribution there - which while purporting to
>   > be under the GPL is partly in the form of obfuscator output rather than
>   > source code in the sense of "the preferred form of the work for making
>   > modifications to it".
> I wasn't even aware that there were issues..  Care to elaborate further?

In the vcg README:

  A SPECIAL REMARK ABOUT LICENSE CONDITIONS
     We would certainly like to continue to distribute the documented 
     sources freely, but currently we have the situation that we cannot
     continue in this programmer-friendly way as before.

     Thus, we have uglified some of the files in the distribution: these 
     are the graph layout modules. These files are not anymore readable 
     for human being, but they are readeable for the compiler. Thus you 
     can compile the sources as before, but you cannot find out anymore 
     how the details of the layout algorithms work.

     This is a compromise. I think this is a better solution than to 
     distribute binaries, because the users still can adapt the tool to
     their computer system. (In the layout modules, normally no adaption
     is necessary). Further, we did not spent too much time with 
     uglification, thus the result should not be too ugly ;-)

Look for example at vcg.1.30/src/step1.c for an example of the obfuscator
output.  This is not source within the meaning of the GPL.  A strict view
would say that given a GPLed program without full source, we cannot
distribute it at all; even with a less strict view that the authors
intended this version to be distributed, distributing a program without
proper sources from a *.gnu.org site seems dubious.

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
jsm28@cam.ac.uk