en/debian/prc-tools.txt
2005-01-26
So I bought a palmtop...
... and did not suspect where that purchase would take me.
I bought a PalmOne Zire 21 a few weeks ago, my first palmtop computer. After a couple of days, I started learning to program for it. I installed prc-tools, among other packages, and started hacking away.
A few days ago, I noticed that prc-tools and pilrc have been orphaned due to a MIA maintainer. Like any good Debian developer with a vested interest in an orphaned package, I ITA'd both packages. I worked on and adopt-uploaded a new upstream version of pilrc about 30 hours ago. I started doing the same for prc-tools a few hours ago. My first maintainer build of the package is running in the background as I write this. I hope to be able to adopt-upload before my work day starts in about three hours.
pilrc was a fairly easy package. I noted that the debian/copyright file was obviously very old, and no license audit had ever been done. Fortunately, pilrc consists of less than a hundred source files, and I could do a complete license audit in a hour or two. The result: I had to completely remove the examples. If I ever doubted my earlier conclusion that no license audit had been done, the doubt vanished at this point: most of the examples had copyright notices with an expliicit prohibition of distribution! And the files had been a part of the package for years...
Now, prc-tools is a much harder piece of work. Not only does the package contain two separate versions of GCC, it also contains about 185 other files, many of them obtained from various sources, apparently with little concern for licensing. I will have to perform a proper license audit some time, and I'm concerned about what I'll find. For now, I will pretend the problem doesn't exist, just to preserve my sanity.
(Oh, if anybody with too much time on their hands reads this, I'd appreciate help on the license audit. Contact me if you are interested.)
05:22 - /en/debian - 0 comments
