Building fasm debian package (weird idea)

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MCD

Joined: 21 Aug 2004
Posts: 602
Location: Germany

MCD 12 Jan 2008, 16:26

Some days ago, I had the thought of building a debian .deb package out of fasm, but there are several issues I would like to ask before starting it on my own:

1.) is there a need? does anyone need or want this?
2.) the documentation should be revised - it is full of grammatical uglyness - and maybe converted into troff format to make a manpage out of it
3.) I'm not sure whether the coding style (minimalistic bare assembly) and its maintainability apply to the Debian Policies.
4.) I'm also somewhat unsure whether there are at all versions of fasm which would be considered stable enough by some Debian maintainer

I would like to hear any feedback

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12 Jan 2008, 16:26

Raedwulf

Joined: 13 Jul 2005
Posts: 375
Location: United Kingdom

Raedwulf 14 Jan 2008, 08:44

1.) Not really, unless you want fasm in /usr/bin and accessible by all users - but FASM is not big enough in size for sharing to be a concern.
2.) Yea the documentation could be better - but I'm impressed with the documentation because everything is in there - Tomasz just used some form of uber compression on it Razz

.
3.) I think it could adhere to the policies... perhaps go into contrib?
4.) Don't know, maybe ask one?

14 Jan 2008, 08:44

Chewy509

Joined: 19 Jun 2003
Posts: 297
Location: Bris-vegas, Australia

Chewy509 16 Jan 2008, 02:18

1, Debian includes both GAS and NASM. However I personally don't use a Linux distro, so have no care for it.

2, The Documentation as far as a man page goes, the man page should describe just the command line arguments, with a link to /usr/share/doc/fasm/readme.txt for further documentation.

3, See 1. For Debian the biggest concern would be the FASM license, not the end product itself. As Raedwulf mentions, having it as a contrib package would be a good way to start. Anyway FreeBSD has FASM in it's ports collection...

4, Since FASM is fairly mature and FASM has no dependencies (to other packages) the latest should suffice.

For Linux, I would only recommend *.deb and *.rpm... Most distro's can handle both formats with ease, if not, they have a *.tgz package as well...

16 Jan 2008, 02:18

MCD

Joined: 21 Aug 2004
Posts: 602
Location: Germany

MCD 17 Jan 2008, 15:51

Chewy509 wrote:

1, Debian includes both GAS and NASM. However I personally don't use a Linux distro, so have no care for it.

but i personally think GAS is awful.
Nasm is Nice, but fasm is better

Chewy509 wrote:

2, The Documentation as far as a man page goes, the man page should describe just the command line arguments, with a link to /usr/share/doc/fasm/readme.txt for further documentation.

Agreed. But how does it come that programs like GNU bash, GNU grep and the GNU find programs have their (IIRC)full documentation included in the manpages?

Chewy509 wrote:

3, See 1. For Debian the biggest concern would be the FASM license, not the end product itself.

Since fasm has the GPL 2.0 license and this license is compatible with Debian (free in the sense of Debian), fasm could even go to the main pool, if other aspects of fasm would allow so.

17 Jan 2008, 15:51

LocoDelAssembly
Your code has a bug

Joined: 06 May 2005
Posts: 4624
Location: Argentina

LocoDelAssembly 17 Jan 2008, 15:58

Quote:

Since fasm has the GPL 2.0 license

I think that fasm has bsd or bsd-like license:

Quote:

This program is free for commercial and non-commercial use as long as
the following conditions are adhered to.

Copyright remains Tomasz Grysztar, and as such any Copyright notices
in the code are not to be removed.
.
.
.
The licence and distribution terms for any publically available
version or derivative of this code cannot be changed. i.e. this code
cannot simply be copied and put under another distribution licence
(including the GNU Public Licence).

17 Jan 2008, 15:58

MCD

Joined: 21 Aug 2004
Posts: 602
Location: Germany

MCD 19 Jan 2008, 11:20

LocoDelAssembly wrote:

Quote:

Since fasm has the GPL 2.0 license

I think that fasm has bsd or bsd-like license:

oops

19 Jan 2008, 11:20

Raedwulf

Joined: 13 Jul 2005
Posts: 375
Location: United Kingdom

Raedwulf 28 Jan 2008, 08:06

Maybe ask Tomasz for permission to release under GPLv2/3?

28 Jan 2008, 08:06

vid
Verbosity in development

Joined: 05 Sep 2003
Posts: 7105
Location: Slovakia

vid 28 Jan 2008, 12:17

Is non-GPL a problem against making debian package?

28 Jan 2008, 12:17

MCD

Joined: 21 Aug 2004
Posts: 602
Location: Germany

MCD 01 Feb 2008, 06:03

vid wrote:

Is non-GPL a problem against making debian package?

no, it's actually not, since Debian also allows packages which are not considered free-enough to be in the main pool, but these packages got to go into the non-Free pool.

01 Feb 2008, 06:03

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