Re: Debian readline/libedit breakage

On 02/14/2011 08:27 AM, Greg Smith wrote:
> Markus Wanner wrote:
>> Anybody realized that this Debian bug (and several others) got closed in
>> the mean time (Sunday)?  According to the changelog [1], Martin Pitt
>> (which I'm CC'ing here, as he might not be aware of this thread, yet)
>> worked around this issue by pre-loading readline via LD_PRELOAD for 
>> psql.
>>
>> Personally, I'm a bit suspicious about that solution (technically as
>> well as from a licensing perspective), but it's probably the simplest
>> way to let only psql link against readline.
>
> This originated in 
> http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=608442 , and from 
> what I'm reading there it sounds like Martin is inserting this as a 
> workaround but it hasn't passed through Debian Legal yet.  I would 
> expect them to reject this as unacceptable.  Dynamic linking via 
> LD_PRELOAD is still linking, even if it happens at runtime.  I commend 
> Martin for buying some time here by doing that, but this doesn't 
> change the urgency to come up with an alternate solution much to me.  
> As I see it, that change could be reverted at any time via pushback 
> from legal.
>
> As far as working around this by releasing our own packages goes, 
> that's useful, but I'd also characterize that as only a workaround 
> rather than a real solution.  OpenSSL is open-source, but it's not 
> "free software" via that standards of the FSF, which I feel is a 
> completely reasonable position given the license.  When you depend on 
> a software stack built from unambiguously free software, having 
> components that aren't you've wedged in there and are dependent on is 
> never a good idea.  I won't consider this truly resolved until GnuTLS 
> support for PostgreSQL is in core.

Given the links Marko just posted, maybe NSS would be a better bet. 
Apparently they also have some sort of compatibility library too.

I agree that the LD_PRELOAD trick seems absurd, and unlikely to be 
acceptable to FSF types.

cheers

andrew