license conflicts and making ports distributable (was: Re: macports-dev Digest, Vol 80, Issue 40)

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Apr 21, 2013, at 23:51, Leo Singer wrote:

> On Apr 21, 2013, at 6:34 PM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
> 
>> On Apr 21, 2013, at 17:32, Leo Singer wrote:
>> 
>>> Also, is there a list somewhere of for which licenses we build binaries?
>> 
>> It's not a list; it's a check of whether the combination of the licenses of the port and all its dependencies are compatible. You can use the port_binary_distributable.tcl script (in base/portmgr/jobs) to determine if any particular port is distributable, and if not, why not.
> 
> Thank you; that's exactly what I was looking for. In this case, I am trying to understand why the port 'htcondor' is not being prebuilt:
> 
> $ ./port_binary_distributable.tcl -v htcondor
> dependency 'latex2html' has license 'GPL-2' which conflicts with license 'apache' from 'htcondor'
> 
> latex2html is used while generating the htcondor manpages. What is it in the GPL-2 license that conflicts with the Apache license in regard to creating binary distributables?

Probably nothing. If latex2html installed GPL-licensed libraries, and non-GPL-licensed htcondor linked with those libraries, then it would be a problem. But latex2html doesn't install libraries. So the line "installs_libs no" should be added to the latex2html port so that this is not considered a license conflict.

I'm actually surprised by this requirement, since latex2html already says "supported_archs noarch", and surely a port that does not install any architecture-specific files cannot install a library that can be linked to. I thought "supported_archs noarch" implied "installs_libs no". But it does not seem to.