Re: A few gnu M4 extensions

[Eric Blake]

On 10/19/2012 10:22 AM, gwenael chailleu wrote:
> Hello Eric,
> 
> Well, we were very happy to discover and use gnu M4 and we will be happy if
> our extension come to be accepted.
> 
> Technically speaking, the main drawback is that our version needs to be
> linked to Judy Arrays library.

What is the licensing of that library?  [It wasn't listed at the link
you gave of http://judy.sourceforge.net/; I had to go hunting; even
http://sourceforge.net/projects/judy/ only gives an ambiguous statement
"GPL or LGPL" without mentioning which actual license or version of that
license; but it looks like
http://judy.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/judy/trunk/COPYING?revision=59&view=markup
clears it up: LGPLv2+, so it is appropriate for linking into the GPLv3+
m4 by invoking the 'or later' clause of LGPLv2+ and using the library as
LGPLv3+]

Next, how popular is that library - is it already pre-compiled and
available on lots of distros, or would we be depending on something
unlikely to be present on must user's machines?  [I at least found it
with 'yum install Judy' on my Fedora 17 box, but it wasn't pre-installed
by anything else I've ever done on that box]

I'm very hesitant to mandate the library, so how hard would it be to
have a fallback if the library is not present?

> 
> there is an advantage associated to this drawback : each improvement of
> JudyL will have impact on m4. (gprof says that our token recognition JudyL
> based function takes 16% of the execution time)
> 
> We will let you evaluate what can be taken (for example there is no
> prerequisite for the integration of the new builtins) and what must be left
> aside.
> 
> What's next move ?
> Do you want a tgz of our directory ?

Not yet.  I don't want to pollute myself by reading your code until we
are certain that copyright considerations are taken care of first.

-- 
Eric Blake   address@hidden    +1-919-301-3266
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

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