[Debian-med-packaging] Your try to get a free libcolt-java (Was: r16752 - in trunk/packages/libcolt-java/trunk/debian: . patches)

[Andreas Tille]

Hi Tim,

many thanks for trying your luck to free libcolt-java.  It is really
appreciated and I would really love if others would try to join your
attempt.

However, when reading your comment of the patch:

On Tue, Apr 22, 2014 at 02:49:21PM +0000, Timothy Booth wrote:
> Added: trunk/packages/libcolt-java/trunk/debian/patches/build_without_aida_interface_defs.patch
> ===================================================================
> --- trunk/packages/libcolt-java/trunk/debian/patches/build_without_aida_interface_defs.patch	                        (rev 0)
> +++ trunk/packages/libcolt-java/trunk/debian/patches/build_without_aida_interface_defs.patch	2014-04-22 14:49:20 UTC (rev 16752)
> @@ -0,0 +1,948 @@
> +This patch forcefully rips out references to all the I*.java interface files
> +that are not DFSG-free, having a "no military use" restriction.
> +
> +See: http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/debian-med-packaging/2014-April/025987.html
> +
> +However, it is ambiguous whether the files uder hep/aida/ref and hep/aida/bin are also
> +under the non-free license.  Only Wolfgang Hoschek can answer this question and he has been
> +sadly silent so far.  So I don't know if this patch actually solves anything or not.
> +
> +The code is (or should be) functionally equivalent since the interface defs contain no actual code,
> +only function and class prototypes, and the process of removing them was mostly a matter of
> +find-and-replace of the interface names with the implementing class names.  However the code
> +is certainly less neat after this patch - especially as I forced VariableAxis to inherit from
> +FixedAxis - and also any code which links against Colt and references the I* classes will fail
> +to build and will require patching too.
> +
> +-- Tim Booth <tbooth at ceh.ac.uk>, April 2014

I think we are not done yet.  Quoting xdocs/license.xml says:

Packages hep.aida.*
  ...  with the exception that any usage related to military applications
       is expressly forbidden

So I think even a patch to the existing code is not sufficient since the
patch does not kick the code out of the source package.  We rather need
something like

   Files-Excluded: src/hep/aida

in d/copyright to fullfill the requirement to get the package accepted
in Debian main.  I wonder whether the package

   libjas-plotter-java

might provide some replacement code or whether we could make use of

   http://aida.freehep.org/download.thtml

(after packaging it following the scheme of other freehep packages.)

Or we try again to nag the only person who is involved in this code who
was actually at least answering and did not covered in total silence.
May be we really try the approach I suggested here:

   https://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/debian-med-packaging/2014-February/025141.html

Kind regards

     Andreas.

-- 
http://fam-tille.de