rail is a tool to generate syntax diagrams (railroad diagrams). License of this thing is unclear, I'll try to contact author and maintainer. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce:
Created attachment 55024 [details] portage/dev-tex/rail/rail-1.2.1.ebuild
Thanks for your report. The only concern with this ebuild is its license. (CTAN page says its license is unknown, too) Please report back if you can contact the author.
So far I got no reply from either L.W.J. Rooijakkers (lwj a cs d kun d netherlands) nor K. Barthelmann (barthel a informatik d uni-mainz d germany). Is there some way to add packages without known license?
I tried to contact them again and found out that the address of the author, L.W.J. Rooijakkers, is no longer valid. I guess I forgot about this error reply the last time. I'm contacting the nijmeegs instituut voor informatica en informatiekunde to find out his whereabous.
Still no response from any of the rail copyright holders? This can't be added to portage without a valid license (we have to assume it has a proprietary license).
Still no news so far. I started another round of emails, to the last known employers of both people, to see if I can pick up their trail. I'll wait for the replies and post them here. If you hear nothing from me, I got no replies myself. lwj@cs.kun.nl as given in the README no longer exists. l.rooijakkers@spcgroup.nl listed on http://www.cs.ru.nl/ita/group/former_members/ no longer exists. barthel@informatik... as given in README2e: Mr. Barthelmann no longer works there and probably does not receive email to this account. I phoned the secretary and got a private mail address, waiting for a reply from there. Google turned up two possible recent mail addresses for a Luc Rooijakkers, I wrote to both. I also contacted his university work group (ITA) secretary as well as the IETF, as his name was mentioned in several IETF-related documents.
I'm glad your not working with my local tex authorities, trying to locate me (no one seems to escape) :-P But you are doing a very good job! Lets give it another month if you/we have nothing by then, i'll close it (CANTFIX or NEEDINFO).
I really got replies this time. :-) Luc Rooijakkers wrote: > As far as I can remember, no license was stated explicitly. > You may treat it as public domain but I would appreciate some > credit if you modify or distribute it in a major way. Klaus Barthelmann wrote (as our correspondence was in German): > Meinen (vergleichsweise kleinen) Anteil w
I really got replies this time. :-) Luc Rooijakkers wrote: > As far as I can remember, no license was stated explicitly. > You may treat it as public domain but I would appreciate some > credit if you modify or distribute it in a major way. Klaus Barthelmann wrote (as our correspondence was in German): > Meinen (vergleichsweise kleinen) Anteil würde ich so freizügig > wie möglich lizensieren, d.h. public domain. Insgesamt sollte > natürlich verhindert werden, dass das Paket von dritter Seite > kommerziell vertrieben wird. Die Gefahr schätze ich allerdings > als sehr gering ein; im Gegenteil halte ich das Ganze für obsolet. A rough translation: "I would license my (comparatively small) part as liberally as possible, i.e. public domain. On the whole it should of course be avoided that this package is sold comercially by third parties. However I think this risk is very low; on the contraty I'd consider the whole thing obsolete." Mr. Barthelmann did not wish to have his private email address made public. So I'd say this is LICENSE="public-domain" and ready for the portage tree.
Great! But we cannot add it to portage until we get some sort of public statement from the authors (probably enough with Luc Rooijakkers) saying that this is indeed the license. This can (or so have I been told) be done in two ways. 1. They update the ctan page with the license. 2. They send a signed mail (or if you have a signed mail from them) that states that the license is public-domain. The mail should be signed with a public key that is recognized to be of one of the authors at least. I know this is tedious, but we need to cover our backs.
I forgot to give feedback here back then. Luc Rooijakkers argued that we would have nothing to verify a signed mail against, and that a public statement on his homepage would proove nothing. Klaus Barthelmann got annoyed by my requests, it seems, and stated he didn't care about Gentoo. On the whole I think the risk of annoying the original maintainers by requiring too much legal overhead is far greater than the risk of serious legal trouble if we simply include the ebuild.
Created attachment 176876 [details] rail-1.2.1.ebuild Updated ebuild: * Changed LICENSE to public-domain as argued above * Changed RDEPEND from tetex to virtual/tex-base * Changed SRC_URI from a specific ctan mirror to the generic mirror.ctan.org * Changed SRC_URI from .tar.gz to .zip, as the former is no longer available
This package has since made it into the main tree: http://sources.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/gentoo-x86/dev-tex/rail/rail-1.2_p1.ebuild?revision=1.1&view=markup
@licenses, this package has been in the tree for some time now (imported from sunrise with LICENSE="LPPL-1.2"), but as far as I can tell, the situation described in this bug isn't yet solved.
(In reply to Michael Palimaka (kensington) from comment #14) *shrug* If we think that the replies in comment #9 are sufficient, then we should label the package as "public-domain". If not, then the package should be removed altogether.
The ebuild says LICENSE="LPPL-1.2" which is definitely wrong. Since the package is distributed on CTAN (see URL) since many years, I would suggest that we change its license label to "public domain" per comment #9.
The bug has been closed via the following commit(s): https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.git/commit/?id=1601fc818501e8e9ae4a410466bc60bb63819e6c commit 1601fc818501e8e9ae4a410466bc60bb63819e6c Author: Ulrich Müller <ulm@gentoo.org> AuthorDate: 2019-03-25 20:09:31 +0000 Commit: Ulrich Müller <ulm@gentoo.org> CommitDate: 2019-03-25 20:10:05 +0000 dev-tex/rail: Fix LICENSE, fix QA issues. Update ebuild to EAPI 7. Change LICENSE to public domain. Fix dependencies. Respect CC, CFLAGS, and LDFLAGS. Build and install documentation properly. Closes: https://bugs.gentoo.org/87542 Closes: https://bugs.gentoo.org/453148 Closes: https://bugs.gentoo.org/625904 Package-Manager: Portage-2.3.62, Repoman-2.3.12 Signed-off-by: Ulrich Müller <ulm@gentoo.org> dev-tex/rail/rail-1.2_p1-r1.ebuild | 35 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ dev-tex/rail/rail-1.2_p1.ebuild | 36 ------------------------------------ 2 files changed, 35 insertions(+), 36 deletions(-)
