Re: Libical Dual License

[rms39 columbia edu (Russell Steinthal)]

On Mon, 18 Oct 1999 15:24:32 MDT, rconover@montana.edu wrote:

>On Mon, 18 Oct 1999, Miguel de Icaza wrote:
>
>> 
>> > I'm glad to hear of the new license terms, and hope that we can 
make
>> > good use of libical.  I've subscribed to the libical mailing 
list,
>> > and, unless one of the principal developers of gnomecal wants to 
do
>> > it, I'll volunteer to work on/coordinate the integration from the
>> > gnomecal side.  (Of course, what that means is still unclear to 
me;
>> > are we going to continue to improve the current gnomecal code 
base,
>> > or are we waiting to move to the new integrated app?)
>> 
>> We are moving toward a new integrated app, but integration is 
achieved
>> by means of Bonobo components.  So gnomecal will just become a 
Bonobo
>> component (we might still provide an alias "gnomecal" that will be 
a
>> 5-line program that basically embeds a GnomeCal Bonobo object)
>
>Looking over the libical sources, I've found that it uses some 
internal
>memory management routines (i.e. icalmemory.*).  Do we want to have
>libical use glib routines, or continue to use the libical memory 
routines?
>
>In summary, do we want to have libical use glib routines or leave it 
how
>it is?

While in theory it is nice to have a consistent set of library functions in use (as glib is in gnomecal at present), I forsee a host of maintainability problems if we try to switch the code in libical- remember, we're not taking over maintenance of libical, we just want to use it.  Moving to glib would require us to maintain our own version of the libical sources, merge in patches from the main distribution, etc- essentially we'd be forking the code.

It's ultimately Miguel's call (along with the other maintainers of gnomecal/Evolution/whatever), but IMHO, unless there's a compelling reason to fork, I'd rather avoid it if at all possible.  (Read: I don't think that the use of glib is a sufficiently good reason to do that much maintenance work.)

-Russell

-- 
Russell Steinthal		Columbia Law School, Class of 2002
<rms39@columbia.edu>		Columbia College, Class of 1999
<steintr@nj.org>		UNIX System Administrator, nj.org