Relicensing (was Re: Initial cut at a Debian package linting wrapper for Firehose)

[David Malcolm]

On Sun, 2013-02-10 at 16:09 -0500, David Malcolm wrote:
> On Sat, 2013-02-09 at 18:48 -0500, Paul Tagliamonte wrote:
> > Hello, Firehosen,
> > 
> > I've just hacked a basic wrapper around one of the most used Debian
> > tools; Lintian. It's currently brokenish (need to work out some stray
> > Nones in the schema), but should be good to go shortly. Check it out on
> > GitHub[1]
> 
> Nice.  I started making a list of projects using Firehose in the
> README.rst and added a link.
> 
> > While wrapping it, I also added some helper functions which could use
> > some feedback. They're very Debian-centric, but could be simply adapted
> > for Firehose proper if we decided on that.
> 
> Those would be:
> https://github.com/paultag/storz/blob/master/storz/deb.py
> right?
> 
> If every Debian project using Firehose is going to use code like that,
> then it would makes sense to slurp that into Firehose itself, but I
> don't want to force dependencies on people using Firehose that aren't
> using the deb functionality (I see you have a couple of "from debian"
> imports, which don't exist on this box).
> So you could put these into a new firehose/debian.py, or alternatively
> put the imports into *method scope* within firehose/report.py, and have
> a couple of DebianBinary.from_deb() and DebianSource.from_dsc()
> classmethods.  (If you also want to slurp in the exception classes into
> firehose you'd want to rename them also, naturally)

Oh, and we chatted about this on IRC, but it's worth mentioning here:
we're going to relicense Firehose from GPLv3, probably to "LGPLv2.1 or
later", to allow it to be license-compatible with a broader array of
projects.  (I need it to be compatible with GPLv3 so that I can run it
from inside GCC, but I'd prefer a more liberal license so it can be used
e.g. in a wide array of web apps for reporting, and embedded in other
Python-based static analyzers).

See:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing:Main?rd=Licensing#GPL_Compatibility_Matrix

Paul: you already agreed to this on IRC, right?  The only other
contributor so far is Michael Hrivnak (CCed) who verbally gave me
permission to relicense as I saw fit when we created this thing at
FUDcon a few weeks ago (and also another Red Hatter).   (Better to
relicense sooner rather than later, i.e. whilst the number of
contributors is small)

Dave