Re: gcc SRPM

On Feb 25, 2005, at 1:12 AM, John Summerfield wrote:

> Perhaps a little confused as to who's responsible, but the point still 
> stands. If the binaries are shipped as an RPM, then the package i a 
> derived work and so still covered by the GPL, and the srource RPM is 
> the most sensible packaging to enable a user to recreate the binaries. 
> In some cases a tarball containing the spec file will work as will an 
> expanded source rpm, but I don't think either is more convenient to 
> most users or developers than the source rpm.

Apple doesn't ship gcc as an RPM, so there's no reason for it to ship 
the sources as an SRPM.  It ships the sources as a tarball, thus 
complying fully with the GPL.  As others have noted, the GPL also makes 
no stipulation on the archival format ("thou shalt distribute all 
sources in the tar format with bzip2 compression using a compression 
flag of 5 and no higher") so there's really no point in even raising 
the GPL in this discussion.  If I shipped the binary as part of a 
debian package on a CD and made the sources available as a zip file on 
the net, I'd be fully covered - you're interpreting the GPL far too 
narrowly if it seems otherwise to you.

Making an SRPM would also require writing an RPM spec file for gcc on 
Mac OS X, something either Apple OR OpenDarwin would be doing just for 
you since neither uses RPM as part of its build process.  I doubt 
anyone is going to invest the time and effort into doing this for an 
audience of one, and given that you're the only one to ask so far...

There's nothing to stop you from doing this yourself, of course, and 
given the way the winds are blowing, I suspect that's going to be your 
only option in any case.

- Jordan