On Thu, 2007-08-16 at 14:22 +0100, Brian Hulley wrote:
Sounds to me like the simlest solution for you would be if GHC could use a dynamically linked gmp.dll on Windows. That also sounds like much less work that replacing gmp completely. This would certainly make things easier though it doesn't solve every problem. For example, the LGPL requires you to give permission to people to reverse engineer your application, in order for them to be able to understand it enough to get it to work with an updated version of the LGPL component. Although this is perfectly reasonable imho, it leaves me with a problem if my application also needs to make use of eg Microsoft runtime components or third party proprietary statically linked libraries since there are parts of my program binary for which I do not have the authority to grant permission to reverse engineer thus it may not even be possible for me to comply with the terms of the LGPL.
From the LGPL v3:
You may convey a Combined Work under terms of your choice that, taken together, effectively do not restrict modification of the portions of the Library contained in the Combined Work and reverse engineering for debugging such modifications, if you also do each of the following: [list of stuff you have to do] So it looks like you only have not restrict reverse engineering for the purposes of making updated GMP libs work with your program. Since the MS Runtime components do not interact directly with the GMP at all you shouldn't need to grant users the right to reverse engineer those components. Indeed it's only ghc library and rts code that would interact with gmp.dll. BTW, I don't think it should be too hard to construct a notice that indicates that portions of the work are covered by specific copyright licences, the details of which are available. After all Microsoft have dozens of these notices for various bits of BSD code they use and nobody mistakes Windows for Free software.