Re: no license on some test modules

[Eric Blake]

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According to Ralf Wildenhues on 12/12/2007 12:04 AM:
> Hello Eric, all,
> 
> * Eric Blake wrote on Tue, Dec 11, 2007 at 08:18:35PM CET:
>> This may not be the end of the story.  For M4 head, it is now triggering a 
>> libtool bug - libtool mistakenly canonicalizes its link line, and discards 
>> one 
>> of the two instances of $(local_ldadd), which means we are right back to the 
>> link failures.
> 
> I replied to that issue on bug-libtool (--preserve-dup-deps before
> --mode on the libtool link command line, i.e., in *_LIBTOOLFLAGS).

Bruno - is this flag worth adding when using a separate test library?

> 
> I have not had the time to follow this discussion through, sorry,
> but wasn't the original intention to split things up, due to some
> licensing issue?  If you have circular dependencies (which in general
> are a hint at bad interface design, but that may not apply in this
> case), doesn't that mean that the code in your libraries cannot
> reasonably be split apart, and consequently, it's rather questionable
> to allow to treat them differently wrt. licenses?

You are correct that the split was intended to make GPL test modules vs.
LGPL library modules possible (and I would hope that the LGPL library
never refers to symbols in the GPL test library).  However, in M4's case,
there is no use of --lgpl, so both libraries are GPL, so cross-library
references is not a licensing issue.

Hmm - so far, we've only had reports of the problem when using the GPL
progname module to provide the definition of program_name, which is
required by test programs that end up calling error().  Perhaps an
alternative fix is just fixing all of these test programs to declare their
own program_name variable, rather than relying on the progname module to
do it in their behalf (ie. m4 provided its own program_name rather than
using the progname module, which is why progname ended up in the test
library rather than the main library).

- --
Don't work too hard, make some time for fun as well!

Eric Blake             address@hidden
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