Re: [gNewSense-users] Formatting.

[Bake Timmons]

> - the linux-2.6.24-12.22 (12 Mar 08), but I don't know how to download
> the linux-2.6.24-12.22 at once, it seems that we have to do some
> operations to merge the "linux_2.6.24.orig.tar.gz" and the
> "linux_2.6.24-12.22.diff.gz" files at
> https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/hardy/+source/linux/2.6.24-12.22.
> So, if you know how to do, you're welcome!

In addition to those two files, download the third file that is listed:
linux_2.6.24-12.22.dsc

With those three files now in the same directory, simply run
dpkg-source -x linux_2.6.24-12.22.dsc

which will unpack (i.e., merge the tar and diff) the files into a new
directory that you can then work on.

>  Moreover, I'm writing a page on the licenses, based on the gnu's
> licenses page, you can find it at
> http://wiki.gnewsense.org/Licenses/Licenses.  The main objective of
> this is to let the KFV checkers write a link pointing directly to
> the license (on the site responsible for this license) they find. It
> could save lot of time for widely used licenses like GPLv2 (as
> checkers won't have to create a new page describing the content of the
> license but just a link in the table of checking). Moreover, this will
> facilitate the future KFV work by scripting: the script would compare
> the exact content of the new file license and the checked file license
> and not human-readable things like 'various licenses'.
>

I am close to releasing a script that can help Emacs users do KFV, so I
am interested in the above idea.  It is clearly good for scripting.
However, I am concerned about doing without the new pages for describing
the licensed files.

>From what I gather most such new pages contain just the initial comment
from the file, sometimes with a summary of the license either before the
comment or showing up in the formal "summary" comment for the page.  It
seems to me that the main trouble here is the mechanics of creating the
page and devising the summary statement.

What I find convenient about these pages is that including the initial
comment serves as a reassurance about the legal status of the file.
As the phrase "various licenses" suggests, some of these comments are
complicated and it is handy to have them right there.

Scripting can *already* help a lot here.  E.g., my script gives an
option of automatically creating and uploading these "copyright file"
pages. I hope to post it tonight.  In the meantime I will post my own
way of entering license summaries at a keystroke with the help of a
script.  This non-exhaustive list was based on license comments in
kernel files:

0: GPLv3
1: GPLv2 or later
2: GPLv2
3: GPLv1
4: LGPLv3
5: LGPLv2.1
6: LGPLv2.0
7: GFDL v1.2
8: GFDL v1.1
9: Modified BSD license (3-clause)
a: FreeBSD license (2-clause)
b: OpenIB.org BSD license
c: GPLv2 / Modified BSD license
d: GPLv2 / FreeBSD license
e: GPLv2 w/in kernel; otherwise Modified BSD license
f: GPLv2 / MPL v1.1
g: GPL / FreeBSD license
h: X11 (aka MIT) License
i: CPL 1.0 / Modified BSD license / GPLv2
j: GPLv2 + FreeBSD license w/in kernel; otherwise FreeBSD license
k: Public Domain
l: No license, so assumed to be GPLv2.
m: Other software license (free)
n: ?
o: Other software license (non-free)

Beyond convenience, the value here is having standardized phrases to
facilitate future scripting.  More to the point, consider the shortcut:
j: GPLv2 + FreeBSD license w/in kernel; otherwise FreeBSD license

I cannot see how this would be expressible by a list of hyperlinks.  To
be clear, I like the hyperlinks idea, but I cannot see how to do without
pointing to the initial license comment of individual files.

In short, while using hyperlinks to licenses is an interesting idea,
how can we be sure that by simply looking at some hyperlinks to license
files, that the user will deduce the essential meaning of the original
license comment in the file?