[Libreoffice] patch for make to help in gbuild debugging

[Kevin Hunter]

At 11:46am -0400 Thu, 23 Jun 2011, Norbert Thiebaud wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 23, 2011 at 6:35 AM, Michael Meeks wrote:
>> On Thu, 2011-06-23 at 02:23 -0500, Norbert Thiebaud wrote:
>>> So I created a patch for make-3.82 that allow the use of
>>> --debug=e,c That add trace about, respectively, $(eval and
>>> $(scall see:
>>> http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/contrib/dev-tools/commit/?id=a4f03f17f42ded70e6a3c49cf4e9a90eaf3c12ca
>>
>> Can we get that up-stream into make, like my glob speedup ? do you
>> wantme to fwd your patch to the list [ which is hard to interact
>> with sadly - Reply-To: mangling and low traffic ;-].
>
> Doesn't FSF require paperwork ? I looked at the make project page on
> savanah, but that was less than helpful. on that topic.

I don't think so, and I've yet to find any text suggesting so.  A 
perhaps telling snippet From RMS' blog:

"It is up to you which of these activities to permit, but here are the 
FSF's recommendations. If you plan to make major contributions to the 
project, insist that the contribution agreement require that software 
versions including your contributions be available to the public under a 
free software license. This will allow the developer to sell exceptions, 
but prevent it from using your contributions in software that is only 
available under a proprietary license.

If your contributions are smaller, you could accept a weaker condition 
that the company make your contributions available in a free software 
release as well as possibly in nonfree programs. This would allow the 
company to use your contributions in modified software that's only 
available under a proprietary license. Releasing proprietary software is 
never a good thing, but if your changes are smaller, it might be more 
important to improve the free version than resist the nonfree versions."

-- http://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/assigning-copyright

My guess is that if the Make maintainers wanted to incorporate your
code, as long as it's under GPLv3+, then they would accept it.  Of note,
here is a GNU Make news item (circa 2007)

http://savannah.gnu.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=4932

> the web-base thing to submit patch seems to be a patch graveyard
> more than anything else...

That's a different issue.  If the maintainers have lost interest, then ...

Cheers,

Kevin