Thread: Sailfish(Jolla): Ideas/Qns & Concerns/Criticisms
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wicket is offline wicket
2013-02-19 , 00:18
Posts: 634 | Thanked: 3,266 times | Joined on May 2010 @ Colombia
#350
I just noticed that one of the questions I asked in the document has already been answered.

This was my question:

Currently Mer repositories include coreutils 6.9 which is several years old. The software that I am porting expects to find shell utilities which are only present in newer releases of coreutils. Will Sailfish use the same version of coreutils that is currently included in Mer? What reasons are there for the Mer not including a more recent stable release of coreutils?
This is the response:

Mer tries to restrict most important core packages to GPLv2 due to vendors discomfort with GPLv3 caused by the anti tivoization clause. This causes the usage of older version of coreutils.
I realise that the primary customers of Mer are device vendors but as a developer/end-user I can't help but feel hugely disappointed by this stance.

It's sad that coreutils and other packages will be left outdated and will require extra porting effort to work around the differences between versions but my main concerns lie with compatibility.

I hate to think about what sort of tivoized coreutils a device vendor might conjure up and the incompatibilities that could be introduced as result.

Having an old version of coreutils in Mer make also makes it difficult to target Plasma Desktop and Plasma Active with a single package given that most Plasma Desktop installations will be using a more recent version of coreutils.

The Yocto Project doesn't seem to have a problem with GPLv3 in coreutils.
Last edited by wicket; 2013-02-19 at 00:20.
 

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