On 06/14/2011 07:41 PM, Kevin Kofler wrote: > PS: > > Paul Johnson wrote: >> I was wondering if there could be an exception here, since the code is >> actually available and open. > > Have you even looked at that "source code"? I just have: > > 1. They refer to the Window$ download for the code. That's a .EXE file > created with some proprietary installer generator (probably something that's > part of that "Black Box" crap), 7z cannot do anything with it (and it can > unpack at least self extractors and NSIS installers). Rather than running > that EXE in WINE to get at the .odc files, I decided to look elsewhere, and > in fact found their repository, but: I'm wanting to use BUGS myself, so I've spent some time today poking around at it. Here's a report on what I've found; it might help in future analysis or further work on making this software usable and available. They use Inno Setup for their installer, so it is "proprietary" in the sense that the format is not standardized, but Inno Setup is open source. Its source code has been used to write innounp[1], an unpacker for Inno Setup files. Unfortunately, Inno Setup and innounp are written in Delphi, so the usefulness diminishes at that point. However, it should be possible to construct a portable unpacker using the innounp sources as a reference, and it may even be possble to build them with FreePascal, depending on how much Delphi-specific stuff they use. Also, there is the cp-dev project[2] for building Component Pascal programs on Linux, but it seems to want plain text input (.cp rather than .odc) and also seems to require Black Box to bootstrap. I do not know if it is self-hosting after the initial bootstrap. So, a from-source build is still a ways off, but not necessarily entirely unfeasible. If cp-dev is self-hosting, license-clean[3], and capable of building OpenBUGS, is there a way to get it in to Fedora? It seems it would require running an initial pre-compiled binary, bootstrapped with Black Box, to then be able to recompile cp-dev from SRPMs and use the recompiled version to keep it up to date. There is still the issue of the lack of a free software viewer and editor for the .odc files, but that seems to be a separate issue from that of being able to re-build OpenBUGS with a completely free toolchain. It could be that OpenBUGS will forever need to live in third-party repositories. - Michael 1. http://innounp.sourceforge.net/ 2. http://cp-dev.sourceforge.net 3. cp-dev seems to not only use Black Box to bootstrap, but it also seems to use Black Box sources as a part of itself. I have not yet investigated whether this is true and, if true, how the relevant sources are licensed. -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
