SV: [Haskell-cafe] RFC: "Native -XCPP" Proposal

Herbert Valerio Riedel hvriedel at gmail.com
Fri May 8 09:39:24 UTC 2015


Hello,

On 2015-05-08 at 11:28:08 +0200, Niklas Larsson wrote:
> If the intention is to use cpphs as a library, won't the license
> affect every program built with the GHC API? That seems to be a high
> price to pay.

Yes, every program linking the `ghc` package would be affected by
LGPL+SLE albeit in a contained way, as it's mentioned on the Wiki page:

| - As a practical consequence of the //LGPL with static-linking-exception//
|   (LGPL+SLE), **if no modifications are made to the `cpphs`-parts**
|   (i.e. the LGPL+SLE covered modules) of the GHC code-base,
|   **then there is no requirement to ship (or make available) any source code**
|   together with the binaries, even if other parts of the GHC code-base
|   were modified.

However, don't forget we already have this issue w/ integer-gmp, and
with that the LGPL is in full effect (i.e. w/o a static-linkage-exception!)

In that context, the suggestion was made[1] to handle the cpphs-code
like the GMP code, i.e. allow a compile-time configuration in the GHC
build-system to build a cpphs-free (and/or GMP-free) GHC for those
parties that need to avoid any LGPL-ish code whatsoever in their
toolchain.

Would that address this concern?


 [1]: http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/351pur/rfc_native_xcpp_for_ghc_proposal/cr1cdhb


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