Re: Fwd: permission to re-license strbuf subsystem as LGPL

[Brandon Casey <drafnel@gmail.com>]

2011/9/23 Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com>:
> Brandon Casey <drafnel@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
>> From: Brandon Casey <drafnel@gmail.com>
>> Date: Thu, Sep 22, 2011 at 11:21 PM
>> Subject: permission to re-license strbuf subsystem as LGPL
>>
>> To those who have contributed to git's strbuf subsystem,
>>
>> I'd like to turn git's strbufs into a library.  So with your consent
>> I'd like to re-license the code in strbuf.c and strbuf.h, and any
>> compat/ dependencies as LGPL so that I can create a strbuf library.
>
> That's a laudable goal.  Do you plan on librarizing other universal
> mini-libraries, like parseopt or test-lib?

Not at the moment.

> I wonder if for example "perf" tool in Linux kernel sources (userspace
> companion to perf events subsystem) will move to using it; currently
> it reuses some of internal git minilibraries, IIRC strbuf and parseopt
> included.

I would be pleased if it was useful to them.

> By the way, how the 'strbuf' from git (which I think was created among
> others to avoid additional external dependencies) differs from
> existing C (not C++) string libraries, like 'bstring'[1], The Better
> String Library, or the C libraries in http://bstring.sourceforge.net/features.html?
>
> [1]: http://bstring.sourceforge.net

Hmm, I forgot about bstring.  I think strbuf is a little smaller in
scope than bstring, perhaps less ambitious.  Less abstraction, and
less protection too.  With strbuf, you never forget that you're
dealing with C char arrays.  The data structures are pretty similar,
but I don't think strbuf will ever have a function like

   bconcat(bstring1, bstring2)

instead, you'd just do

   strbuf_add(strbuf1, strbuf2.buf, strbuf2.len)

The benefit, of course, of a bconcat function is that either bstring1
or bstring2 can be NULL (like if a previous bstring2 = bfromcstr()
initialization failed).  This allows you to perform a sequence of
bstring operations and only check errors at the end.

-Brandon