[Buildroot] legal info: saving of external toolchain

[Buildroot] legal info: saving of external toolchain

[Thomas De Schampheleire]

Hi Luca, all,

The legal info infrastructure currently does not do anything for the
toolchain, for 'technical reasons'. I can't recall what these
technical reasons where. At least for external toolchains I don't see
a big problem to copy the toolchain also in the sources/ subdirectory.
The developer then still has the obligation to also provide the
sources that accompany this binary distribution of the toolchain
(which is impossible for buildroot to do), but at least the binary
version is already taken care of.

In fact, the legal-info target already calls toolchain-legal-info, but
it does not do anything really.

What do you think about implementing this for external toolchains (at
least)? The fact that the toolchain is now using the package
infrastructure probably makes that a tad easier.

Thanks,
Thomas

[Buildroot] legal info: saving of external toolchain

[Luca Ceresoli]

Hi Thomas,

Thomas De Schampheleire wrote:
> Hi Luca, all,
>
> The legal info infrastructure currently does not do anything for the
> toolchain, for 'technical reasons'. I can't recall what these
> technical reasons where. At least for external toolchains I don't see
> a big problem to copy the toolchain also in the sources/ subdirectory.
> The developer then still has the obligation to also provide the
> sources that accompany this binary distribution of the toolchain
> (which is impossible for buildroot to do), but at least the binary
> version is already taken care of.

Some stuff is better than no stuff. :)

>
> In fact, the legal-info target already calls toolchain-legal-info, but
> it does not do anything really.
>
> What do you think about implementing this for external toolchains (at
> least)? The fact that the toolchain is now using the package
> infrastructure probably makes that a tad easier.

Indeed it should be quite straightforward. It the toolchain is 
downloaded, then the tarball may just be copied (or hardlinked).
Otherwise we simply have to tar the toolchain directory.


-- 
Luca

[Buildroot] legal info: saving of external toolchain

[Thomas Petazzoni]

Dear Thomas De Schampheleire,

On Thu, 10 Oct 2013 16:51:41 +0200, Thomas De Schampheleire wrote:

> The legal info infrastructure currently does not do anything for the
> toolchain, for 'technical reasons'. I can't recall what these
> technical reasons where. At least for external toolchains I don't see
> a big problem to copy the toolchain also in the sources/ subdirectory.
> The developer then still has the obligation to also provide the
> sources that accompany this binary distribution of the toolchain
> (which is impossible for buildroot to do), but at least the binary
> version is already taken care of.
> 
> In fact, the legal-info target already calls toolchain-legal-info, but
> it does not do anything really.
> 
> What do you think about implementing this for external toolchains (at
> least)? The fact that the toolchain is now using the package
> infrastructure probably makes that a tad easier.

I do agree. The primary reason I turned the toolchain backends into
package was precisely to be able to leverage all the goodness of the
package infrastructure: source, external-deps and legal-info.

Note that you're only mentioning external toolchains, but it also
applies to the internal toolchain: verifying that we have proper
licensing information on mpfr, gmp, mpc, gcc, glibc, eglibc, uclibc,
binutils would be good.

For external toolchains it's a little bit more complicated, because the
tarballs are actually pre-compiled binaries. To comply with the
license, we would have to add a mechanism to also download the source
code of the external toolchain. For example, for the Sourcery CodeBench
ARM toolchain, the source is in
http://sourcery.mentor.com/public/gnu_toolchain/arm-none-linux-gnueabi/arm-2013.05-24-arm-none-linux-gnueabi.src.tar.bz2.
But we don't really have a good way of encoding that in Buildroot at
the moment, I'm afraid.

Thanks,

Thomas
-- 
Thomas Petazzoni, Free Electrons
Embedded Linux, Kernel and Android engineering
http://free-electrons.com