[Fedora-legal-list] Legal approval of the mingw-w64 toolchain?
Hi Fedora Legal,
Back in Januari this year we (the Fedora MinGW SIG) filed a review
request for various packages belonging to the mingw-w64 cross compiler
toolchain. This was done because we want to add support for
cross-compiling binaries for the win64 target in Fedora.
We made two of these packages (mingw-headers [1] and mingw-crt [2])
block FE-LEGAL as we received some signals in the past that a legal
audit should be done for these packages. We are not entirely sure if
such a legal audit is really necessary but in order to play it safe we
wanted someone from FE-LEGAL/RH-LEGAL to take a look at it.
Earlier this year, one of the lead mingw-w64 developers was hired by Red
Hat. With this step we (the Fedora MinGW SIG) expected that the legal
issues would get sorted out soon, but unfortunately there's still no
news. This mingw-w64 developer has tried to contact RH-LEGAL multiple
times, but he kept getting the answer from the lawyer that other more
important issues got between.
As there have already passed about 10 months since the initial request
we're getting a bit frustrated with the situation as we still don't know
how long this legal approval is going to take.
All other preparations for the introduction of the mingw-w64 toolchain
are already done. We've updated our packaging guidelines [3] and got
them approved by the FPC [4]. We've already ported about 75 mingw32
packages to use these new packaging guidelines [5] and have been testing
everything in a separate yum repo [6] for the time being.
As you can see we have to maintain the mingw packages in two different
places at the moment. Once in the Fedora repos and once in the testing
repo. As this is quite a maintenance burden to keep everything in sync
we would like to merge all changes from the mingw-w64 testing repo back
to the Fedora repos sooner than later. The only thing which is blocking
is from going forward right now is the legal approval.
We are currently aiming for Fedora 17 to introduce the mingw-w64
toolchain. This means that the legal approval has to be done before the
F17 feature submission deadline which is at the end of Januari 2012 [7].
Is there anything we can do to help speed up the legal approval?
Kind regards,
Erik van Pienbroek
Fedora MinGW SIG
[1]: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=673790
[2]: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=673792
[3]: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:MinGW_Future
[4]: https://fedorahosted.org/fpc/ticket/71
[5]: http://svn.openftd.org/svn/fedora_cross/
[6]: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/MinGW/CrossCompilerFramework
[7]: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/17/Schedule