On Mon, Jun 06, 2005 at 10:08:48AM +0200, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
I guess it comes down to with what you mean with "control".
I'm not a
lawyer, but control means to me "have impact on the result". The goal is
that the binary building process is fully reproducable (see earlier
parts of the license about the rationale). All the parts that impact the
results are included in the src.rpm (with some global settings from
redhat-rpm-config which is also shipped). The RH buildsystem actually
calls rpmbuild to build the binary, all it does on top of that is some
queueing. Queueing does not impact the outcome of the build in any way.
Although I agree with most of your comments, two remarks:
- There seem to be a few settings that are different from redhat-rpm-config:
see my thread started with
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2005-February/msg00523....
about rebuilding pango c.s. that was never really answered... OK, I can
imagine what settings it needs, and our local RHEL-rebuild environment
has implemented that ;-), but that's actually a bit of reverse engineering.
At least in FC3 (didn't check FC4t* yet) this was still the issue.
- Except from the build environment software itself, there's always "all
the software on the build host" that may influence a build (more
specifically "configure"). This has no direct relation to releasing
the build environment software, although that software may control it,
but with this I want to say you'll never be 100% sure to exactly match
the original environment. This is also not required by the GPL, IMHO,
as it can be brought down to even HW/BIOS issues, when you look at it
from an academical point of view.
For this discussion it's much more interesting to see how vendors of
proprietary software/equipment with GPL stuff included/embedded deal
with this. There's much more to win in that area, than blaming RH for
not releasing some internal tools: see also <
http://gpl-violations.org/>.
--
-- Jos Vos <jos(a)xos.nl>
-- X/OS Experts in Open Systems BV | Phone: +31 20 6938364
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