[Pkg-ace-devel] Bug#697848: NMU of ace ?

[Thomas Girard]

On 22/01/2013 21:40, Ralf Treinen wrote:
>> I'm more annoyed by #697848. The first two issues raised by Ansgar were
>> not yet discussed with upstream because I need a confirmation on what
>> is exactly the issue. If this is what I underlined in my reply then I
>> am afraid we will have no easy solution except for moving ace to
>> non-free.
> 
> I am afraid I agree with Ansgar that the licence is rife with problems,
> in particular the part where you are not allowed to remove functionality.
> This can be read as forbidding to rip part of the source code and reuse
> it in a different projet. Can it be DFSG-free if this is not allowed ? 

Agreed, but I believe Sun intent here was to ensure that
standardization and implementation efforts (IDL to C++ and IIOP
marshalling rules) do not get ruined by code modifications. Yes, I am
interpreting.

@Johnny: any opinion on this? See [1] for the context.

> Different parts of the source code are covered by different licences. The
> question for me was rather whether it is possible to keep a kernel ace
> package containing only source code that is not covered by problematic
> licences, and possibly move the rest into an ace-nonfree package. Are you
> saying that this is not possible, and that the only possible action 
> would be to move everything to non-free? I don't know anything about the
> structure of the ace package.

ace source package consists in the following software:
 - ACE, a C++ networking library
 - TAO, a CORBA ORB built on top of ACE

What is faulty here is TAO_IDL (idl to C++ mapping) and a piece of
marshalling code (again, for TAO). So ACE can remain in main, but TAO
has to go to non-free.

This means two repackaging: one for ACE and another for TAO (not
distributed stand-alone ATM) in non-free.

Thanks,
Regards,

Thomas

[1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=697848#10