[Libguestfs] modules in gnulib that are GPL

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Sun, Aug 25, 2013 at 02:50:17PM +0300, Or Goshen wrote:
> gettime
> hash
> human
> memcpy
> openat-die
> openat-safer
> quote
> quotearg
> readlinkat
> save-cwd
> symlinkat
> timespec
> utimens
> xstrtol
> xstrtoll
> xstrtoumax
> xvasprintf
> 
> I didnt track where they are uses, some of them arent used directly.

Thanks for looking into this further, but we really do need to
know two more things:

(1) Which parts of libguestfs these are used from (basically
library/bindings or tools).  These are only a problem if used in the
library or bindings.

(2) Whether these are actually used on Linux.  For example 'utimens'
is used in the library, *but* it's not actually used on Linux (because
Linux has a perfectly good utimens function already, so gnulib won't
replace it).

The only module I'm aware of which might be a problem is 'hash'.  This
used to be used only in guestmount when it was a separate (GPL) tool,
but then the same functionality was integrated into the library.  OTOH
'hash' was written by Jim so he may be amenable to relicensing it.

Note that in no case does this "make libguestfs GPL".  libguestfs (the
library part) is published under the LGPLv2+, and it's irrelevant what
people might link to it.

As I said before, I think gnulib is a minefield.  Really it would be
better if it was entirely LGPLv2+.  It's also the case that we cannot
use the gnulib-tool --lgpl flag because that would unnecessarily
restrict the modules we could use.

Rich.

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