Hail status and update (was Re: Question about hail)

[Jeff Garzik <jgarzik@pobox.com>]

(CC'd hail-devel list)

On 11/26/2012 02:28 AM, Hideki Yamane wrote:
> Hello hail upstream authors,
>
>   I'm interested in porting hail (and Aeolus) to Debian, but have some
>   questions about it.

Cool!


> Q: Is this project is still alive? if so, where is the current main site.
>     Could you tell me the status, please?

The main site for source code is currently github.

	https://github.com/jgarzik/hail
	https://github.com/jgarzik/tabled
	https://github.com/jgarzik/itd
	https://github.com/jgarzik/nfs4d

The Hail home page is https://hail.wiki.kernel.org/ but that clearly has 
some stale links on it (see below).

The status is definitely "long pause" at the moment, as it got 
de-prioritized by my employer, but I still have a goal of completing the 
Paxos implementation in CLD, making it truly distributed.

Patches are still accepted, and I want it to keep working on current 
platforms.


>   - its upstream site "hail.wiki.kernel.org" points out some materials
>     but those are empty at all.
>      slide & audio: http://www.kernel.org/pub/media/talks/hail/
>      git repo: http://git.kernel.org/?p=daemon/distsrv/itd.git
>      source: http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/network/distsrv/

Hail was collateral damage in a kernel.org hack.  No data was lost or 
compromised, but it took kernel.org months to recover even basic account 
services and git access.  wikis took months longer after that.  I'm 
still waiting to see if anybody has an archive of old tarballs, because 
k.org was my canonical upstream storage location, with zero local ones.

Local git cryptographic integrity -- the canonical root of all the 
source code -- never disappeared, and was always verified and 
not-hacked.  It briefly moved to github, but is now back at kernel.org.

The tarballs can conceivably be recovered by checking out a git tag, 
re-running autogen.sh, and then "make dist"... but with 
autoconf/automake/libtool upgrades over the years, tarball checksums 
might change using that method.


>    and there's no mail in http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.distributed.hail.devel
>    except spam.

Pete complained about this too.  Not sure what to do about it -- the 
mail server is vger.kernel.org, same as LKML, with a postmaster who 
maintains the spam filter to similar setup and standards.

I was surprised at Pete's spam report at first, too.  I never see any of 
the spam, only the rare hail-devel message, because of good spam 
filtering.  Of course, the M-L archiving bots seem to keep it all.


> Q: Can you add special exemptions for OpenSSL to its license,
>     and add "or later", too?
>
>   - Its license is GPL-2, right? and it links to OpenSSL.
>     However, openssl license is NOT compatible with GPL without special exemptions
>     see http://lintian.debian.org/tags/possible-gpl-code-linked-with-openssl.html
>     and http://www.openssl.org/support/faq.html#LEGAL2
>
>     So, we cannot distribute hail binary without its special exemptions.
>
>   - GPL-2 and GPL-3 is NOT compatible.
>     However, Image Warehouse (part of Aeolus) is licensed under GPL-3, and
>     it seems to link to hail library (hstor.h).
>
>     We should change
>      a) hail to "GPL-2 or later" or "GPL-3 (or later)"
>      b) iwhd to "GPL-2"
>     to avoid license incompatibility.

History:  hail was GPL-2 only, following the lead of the kernel.  But it 
sounds like this is impractical given the few existing users, so I am in 
favor of relicensing to "GPL-2 or later".

I disagree with the interpretation vis a vis openssl and several others 
do too.  However, if this is an impediment to use, I would be happy to 
accept a pull request adding the openssl exemption language.

	Jeff