On Tue, 5 Jan 2021, Zack Weinberg wrote:
Something I found which surprised me is that Automake has added a GNU
COPYING file to my non-GNU non-GPL package. Once the file appeared in
the source directory, it seems that it continued to be used and
included in spite of the Automake options provided.
While I see more detail sprinkled around the generated files, it seems
that this COPYING file may be the biggest issue.
Hmm. If you remove COPYING, make sure that you have `foreign` in
either `AUTOMAKE_OPTIONS` or the options list passed to
`AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE`, and then re-run automake --add-missing, does
COPYING come back? My understanding is that automake --add-missing is
supposed to install a copy of the GPL *only if* it's in `gnu` mode and
can't find any other statement of licensing.
The COPYING file did not come back. I now notice that an INSTALL file
was added as well.
As far as I am aware, at no point were the Automake options not
expressed in some way (via configure.ac or Makefile.am) but I used
Autotools automatic maintenance after editing files (via make) and
perhaps they were added during a transition point.
Regardless, updating a project to use the recommended AC_INT strategy
is not without some danger since it is more rigid than the previous
shell-variable based approach. This is particularly the case for the
project version and how the project version is applied when creating
the tarball.
Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
bfriesen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/
Public Key, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/public-key.txt
