[Xorg] DocBook SGML/XML manual pages...

[Keith Packard]

Around 1 o'clock on May 6, Roland Mainz wrote:

> Erm... when was the decision made to introduce "autotool" stuff into the
> X.org tree (which implies SERIOUS legal questions when the Xorg tree
> starts to depend on non-X.org/MIT-licensed stuff) ?

I guess I don't understand the problem here -- the tree won't contain any
non-MIT licensed material, and when ready for distribution won't require
any GPL licensed utilities to build.  Yes, if you want to build from CVS,
you'll have to get automake, autoconf and libtool installed, or build 
compatible systems.

Note that the libtool script includes an exception clause which permits 
distribution under any license at all when used with autoconf.

Our alternatives are not good -- imake is not up to the task of producing 
a modular build without a whole lot of hacking, and I (for one) would 
really rather see people hacking X code rather than fixing up yet another 
build system.

Autotools have the significant advantage of generating widely portable
configuration scripts which don't depend on any tools which are not part of
a standard POSIX system, that seems as license neutral as we can get.

Egbert has asked that I not push to remove the imake-based build system 
any time soon, so if you really want to, you can continue building the 
system with that.  But, don't expect my sympathy when it's broken...

-keith


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