Re: Effectively force all GNOME users to locally compile ZFS?

[Mark H Weaver]

Hi Ludovic,

Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:

> I would rather have nothing depend on ZFS by default, but we could have
> “libvirt-with-zfs” etc.
>
> I agree that GNOME Boxes and libvirt should not depend on ZFS by default
> because (1) ZFS is an optional feature and probably not widely used, (2)
> ZFS combination with GPL code is problematic and as such we’d rather
> limit it to a minimum, and (3) having users systematically build a
> dependency locally should be avoided in general.
>
> WDYT?

I agree that having a separate 'libvirt-with-zfs' would be preferable.

I see now that there's a problem even on the userspace side:
'virt-manager' is a GPLv2+-licensed program based on 'libvirt'.  If I
understand correctly, it would be a GPL violation for us to distribute
'virt-manager' linked with CDDL-licensed component(s) of ZFS.

For now, I think that commit 61ccd756e5ff73b2f8dc3449df537f1c5adb5872
should be reverted until we can evaluate the situation more carefully.

What do you think?

    Regards,
      Mark

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