Give me a break

Don nospam at nospam.com
Tue Jun 30 07:57:37 PDT 2009


Tom S wrote:
> Don wrote:
>> Tom S wrote:
>>> Lutger wrote:
>>>> Tom S wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Yigal Chripun wrote:
>>>> (snip)
>>>>>> IMHO, the Tango vs. Phobos licensing issue is the biggest bikeshed 
>>>>>> color
>>>>>> problem in the D realm and the only people that can solve it are the
>>>>>> tango devs and walter and co. of which Neither are willing to budge.
>>>>> Uhhh... try listening to Tango folks sometimes. They really have 
>>>>> tried.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> If you can forgive my ignorance, what is the current Tango/Phobos 
>>>> problem you see and refer to here? Is it related to D1 or also 
>>>> concerns a possible  future Tango D2?
>>>
>>> I'm mostly a Tango user, not its developer, so I might be 
>>> misinformed, but there doesn't seem to be any licensing issue except 
>>> a conceptional one.
>>
>> Not true. The issue is that Tango uses the BSD license, which is 
>> inappropriate for a standard library. Phobos2 now uses the Boost 
>> license throughout. Because of the licensing issue, Andrei and Walter 
>> won't look at any Tango code.
>> This could be fixed quite simply by adding the Boost license to the list
>> of Tango licenses (it should replace BSD in my opinion).
> 
> BSD is just one of two options for Tango. What's wrong with AFL v3.0?
> http://dsource.org/projects/tango/wiki/License

AFL v3.0 Section 9.
If You distribute or communicate copies of the Original Work or a 
Derivative Work, You must make a reasonable effort under the 
circumstances to obtain the express assent of recipients to the terms of 
this License.

---
Richard Stallman's comment on this was:

Recent versions of the Open Software License have a term which requires 
distributors to try to obtain explicit assent to the license. This means 
that distributing OSL software on ordinary FTP sites, sending patches to 
ordinary mailing lists, or storing the software in an ordinary version 
control system, is arguably a violation of the license and would subject 
you to possible termination of the license. Thus, the Open Software 
License makes it very difficult to develop software using the ordinary 
tools of free software development. For this reason, and because it is 
incompatible with the GPL, we recommend that no version of the OSL be 
used for any software.
----

> 
>> The next biggest issue is module naming.
> 
> Ouch :D I'll back away from that one quickly.
> 
> 
>>> As for other issues - there's very little communication between the 
>>> 'D Team' and the 'Tango Team'. Much could be learned and borrowed 
>>> from it, but you don't see that in Phobos 2. Looks like we're going 
>>> to end up with two 'utility libraries' that are not compatible with 
>>> one another and instead of complementing each other, they offer ways 
>>> to do the same things in a slightly different manner.
>>
>> Most of the competing functionality is with parts of Phobos which are 
>> going to be ditched, eg the I/O system.
>> In Phobos2, everything will be range-based -- and that introduces a 
>> conceptual difference. (much like the STL in C++ vs the C libraries).
> 
> How much is 'most' here? Modules like base64, bigint, boxer/variant, 
> conv, date utils, filesystem ops, regex, traits, utf/unicode contain a 
> lot of duplicate work.

Yes, AFAIK half of those will be ditched from Phobos. Some were 
copy-and-paste from each other in the first place.

> 
> 
>> The big issue will be, how far can Tango2 go in integrating Phobos2 
>> concepts while retaining as much of Tango1 as possible?
>>
>>>
>>> IIRC, Tango devs claim that its runtime is better than druntime, 
>>> which also only supports DMD at the moment. And apparently, there's 
>>> been very little contact with Sean lately, so it's a case of 'us' vs 
>>> 'them' again.
>>
>> The Phobos2 runtime _is_ the Tango runtime. That problem has been fixed.
> 
> Unless a merger has been done quite recently, it _was_.
> 
> 



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