Bug#814445: Non-Free file: src/stdlib/SDL_qsort.c

[Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo]

[Update]

The issue has been fixed in the libsdl1.2 package (#814445), but copying
this last bit of info in the case that it's useful for the future, in
the case that we need to revisit the issue later.


2016-02-21 13:04 Ben Hutchings:
>
>Gareth has now updated the licence text at
><http://www.mccaughan.org.uk/g/software.html#qsort>

So Ben Hutchings contacted the author of the original code and the
author promptly relicensed and clarified some aspects, so this doesn't
seem to be a legal threat.

In the meanwhile, we had notified SDL upstream and they had changed the
implementation for another one, and when Gareth relicensed it they added
back the new version of Gareth's qsort, so it will be present in the
next releases:

  https://hg.libsdl.org/SDL/log/9cec5fe32bca/src/stdlib/SDL_qsort.c


I tried to backport the fix but there are some technical problems to get
this to work, it doesn't seem to compile right away, not even after
several hacks.

I'd rather wait for the next upstream release to happen rather than to
keep spending time on this, now that things are clarified and that it
seems largely a theoretical threat.  Hopefully the next upstream release
will arrive soon, but maybe the autoremoval process from testing will
kick-in in between, and also I am not sure if it's a good idea to reduce
the severity of this bug.

This code has been there since forever with the same license for many
many Debian releases, and as explained it doesn't seem to be a legal
threat, but still.


Cheers.
-- 
Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo <manuel.montezelo at gmail.com>