Copyleft/guide Changeset - 07bed2fdbf58

Changeset - 07bed2fdbf58

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Bradley Kuhn (bkuhn) - 9 years ago 2014-11-07 13:51:07
bkuhn@ebb.org

Host system requirements & instruction specificity

Include a lesson learned for it, too.

1 file changed with 23 insertions and 10 deletions:

enforcement-case-studies.tex

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enforcement-case-studies.tex

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@@ ... @@
 likely sufficient to meet GPL's requirements.  However, in this case, the
 instructions are more abundant and give more detail.
 ** Since it appears that this source release will build on a wide range of
    distributions, it was fine that no specific distribution was specified.
    However, most source releases we see will only build on a very specific
    distribution, due to a variety of assumptions made about the build
    environment.  While such a situation is not ideal in the general sense, it is
    fine to specify a particular distribution that must be use to build the
    source release (such as "Debian 7 amd64"), from a compliance perspective.
    As an example, we noticed such an assumption later on in this source release,
    but it would be easy to correct in the instructions in this situation (see
    "`GLIBC\verb0_02.14' not found" below).
 These instructions are more general than typical.  Often, top-level build
 instructions will specifically name a host distribution to use, such as
 ``Debian 7 installed on a amd64 system with the following packages
 installed''.  If the build will not complete on any other system,
 instructions should have such details.  However, in this case, the CCS can
 build on a wide range of distributions, and thus no specific distribution was
 specified.
 \label{thinkpenguin-specific-host-system}
 In this specific case, the developers of the libreCMC project (on which the
 TPE-NWIFIROUTER is based) have clearly made effort to ensure the CCS builds
 on a variety of host systems.  The investigator was in fact dubious upon
 seeing these instructions, since finicky embedded build processes usually
 require a very specific host system.   Even in this case, a
 \hyperref[thinkpenguin-glibc-214-issue]{minor annoyance was found that more
   detailed instructions would address}.
 % FIXME: Spend some  time here (admittedly a digression: maybe refer to
 % another section later?) about how it's ok to specify a specific build
@@ ... @@
   to write programmed scripts to do everything.  The ``script'' included can
   certainly be more like the script of a play and less like a Bash script.
 \item {\bf Write build/install instructions to the appropriate level of
   specificity}.  The upstream engineers
   in this case study \hyperref[thinkpenguin-specific-host-system]{clearly did
     additional work to ensure functionality on a wide variety of host build
     systems}; this is quite rare.  When in doubt, include the maximum level
   of detail build engineers can provide with the CCS instructions.
 \end{enumerate}
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