Re: rcs

On Tue, 8 Oct 2013, Adrian Chadd wrote:

> I think that's great. But, as we are increasingly finding, theres no stable
> ports snapshot, so unless we as a project change how packages are managed,
> there may not really be a stable, predictable version of things once
> they're moved from base to a package. A number of users and companies like
> that there is a very strict definition of base and that it wont change as
> the ports tree changes.
>
> Eg, you install 10.0 and get the rcs package from that. You then do an
> install of 10.0 a yeat later and install rcs. If it comes from the
> 10-stable pkgng set, itll pick up the latest version, not the 10.0 version.
> Thats the big ports vs base difference.

Perhaps a perl style "dual life module" set of "core" (errm BASE?) 
packages/ports will emerge. It could resolve some of the perennial "what 
is BASE"? debates - or at least make it possible to have those debates in 
a different way :-)

My understanding is that dealing with the GPLv3 issue for BASE is 
*necessary* for the project. Since the latest rcs releases are licensed 
using GPLv3, FreeBSD's BASE rcs (GPLv2) would have to be maintained 
exclusively by the FreeBSD project - which means more developer overhead 
(the same could be said for gcc I suppose). That seems to be a different 
type of issue than the size/completeness of BASE itself.

Since rcs is a small utility, it's hooked into a script or two via 
rc.subr, it's useful to a lot of folks, it doesn't face the network and 
there's a BSD licensed equivalent sort of available, then maybe the best 
way to go would be to import opencvs's rcs (which is not part in the ports 
version of opencvs) to replace the GNU version.