More on Cygwin package naming

Luke Kendall luke.kendall@cisra.canon.com.au
Mon Sep 5 03:15:00 GMT 2011


In my previous mail I may have used the wrong term ("package"): the term 
"package" seems to refer to each .tar.bz2 file (for the source and 
install files of each version).  So perhaps I should instead be talking 
about "@-names" - the name that appears after an "@" in setup.ini.

Anyway, this is all related to me trying to determine the licenses for 
each Cygwin "@-name".  What I've found so far is that:

- Most cygwin @-names are simply the upstream "vendor"s project name.
- But it's not rare for the name not to match at all.  This seems to 
happen when a parent Freshmeat project is split into several cygwin 
"@-named" pieces: in that situation, I can't find any automatable way to 
tie the child names back to the parent.  E.g. libncurses9 is a cygwin 
item from within the ncurses freshmeat project; or  libintl, 
libintl{2,3,8} in cygwin, which are all part of the gettext project on 
Freshmeat.  Currently I'm resorting to human inspection.

I'd love to know if there's some way to determine this kind of 
parent-child relationship.  Is there some setup.hint or upset or genini 
file or info lurking around (where?) that I could scrape such 
information out of?

Charles Wilson suggested it's safer to find licenses by looking in the 
source, but a minor problem is that to do that I must either download 
all the source "just in case" (doubling the download), or else I have to 
further complicate things to download on demand if I discover the 
install package doesn't contain any licenses.
(So far I have only downloaded Cygwin by using setup.exe: perhaps I can 
do a wget of extra -src packages outside setup.exe, as needed.  I've 
been developing all this license discovery automation under Linux, 
though it should work from an installed Cygwin too, I think.)

Another minor worry is that a closer reading of 
<http://cygwin.com/setup.html>'s description of package naming, is 
talking more about .tar.bz2 version naming.  I couldn't find anything 
that directly spoke about how the name after the "@" in setup.ini is chosen.

It would be /nice/ if someone could confirm that the upstream project 
name is used for the @-names, or at least that cygwin does not use any 
existing Freshmeat project name and apply it to different software.


BTW, Charles Wilson thought:

 > Also, gettext group is similar; some of the libs and apps are GPL, and
 > some of the apps and libs are LGPL.  Fortunately, they are segregated in
 > the cygwin packages:
 > 	libasprintf0:	LGPL
 > 	libintl8:	LGPL
 > 	libgettextpo0:	GPL
 > 	gettext:	LGPL
 > 	gettext-devel	GPL

But FYI, when I looked at Freshmeat, a comment from 2007 said gettext 
changed to GPL3, while noting that the libintl libraries remain at LGPLv2.

Regards,

luke


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