Re: Debian readline/libedit breakage

Hello all,

thanks Markus for CC'ing me, I'm not on -hackers(at)(dot)

Markus Wanner [2011-02-14 13:37 +0100]:
> On 02/10/2011 11:34 PM, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
> > http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=607109

Note that the recent discussions happened on bug 608442, in particular

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=608442#30

and the following comments.

> Personally, I'm a bit suspicious about that solution (technically as
> well as from a licensing perspective), [...]

For the record, so am I (see comment 30 in the link above), as it uses
the very same ld.so in both cases. However, Andreas Barth pointed out
that with LD_PRELOAD it's guaranteed that we do not "import" any code
from the libreadline header files, which guarantees that psql doesn't
become something that can be considered a "derived work".

Technically, this is a bit fragile, of course, as there might be some
subtle ABI differences which lead to crashes. However, the preloading
workaround already makes the situation so much better than before, so
IMHO it's better than the previous status quo.

I don't really like this situation, and personally I'd rather move
back to libreadline until OpenSSL or readline or PostgreSQL threatens
Debian with a legal case for license violation (I daresay that the
chances of this happening are very close to zero..). But oh well..

Thanks, and sorry for all the madness this created!

Martin

--
Martin Pitt | http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com) | Debian Developer (www.debian.org)