Packaging freedos, its GPL but no tools to compile?

[Hans de Goede]

Hi all,

As discussed sometime ago I'm planning on packaging dosemu. I would 
really like to also package freedos and make dosemu depend on it so that 
dosemu actually has something to boot.

The problem is that although freedos is GPL and thus comes with full 
source its impossible to compile it, as it needs to compile:
-nasm     (opensource, runs on linux, can cross"compile", good)
-watcom-C (opensource, but does NOT run on linux, can crosscompile)
-Borland Turbo C++ 1.01 (gratis, download only, not redistributable)


Especially the last one is a big problem, I've tried to recompile 
freedos from src on XP that seems to work under dosemu I'm having less 
success.

Assuming that compiling freedos under dosemu succeeds and I write a bash 
script which starts and pokes dosemu todo just that, I still need 3 
binary tools todo this of which 1 is non opensource, I can probably get 
the other 2 to build underdosemu too (nasm builds with djgpp (gcc for 
dos) and watcom builds with itself).

I currently see 2 options for packaging free dos:
1) build a src.rpm with the sources and the precompiled bins provided by
    upstream, and during the build just extract the precompiled bins.
2) really build it under dosemu using prebuild versions of the needed
    dos tools, 2 of which could be in the src.rpm and one needs to be
    wget-ed during the build!

I personally prefer 1) as 2) is going to be a lot of work. Work which I 
would rather spend in coming up with a way to make one freedos package 
which will work for both dosemu and dosbox.

Ofcourse there are also options 3 and 4:
3) live with having to wget turbo c++, but do the others opensource all
    the way. First create packages using precompiled bins, then use these
    to bootstrap a real build (compile) of these packages under dosemu

4) since we can't build it one can argue that it is not opensource, thus
    we can't ship it.

Opinions and options 5 - xx much appreciated.

Regards,

Hans