Advice about /usr/ports/math/gmp

[John Marino]

On 1/7/2014 04:25, Matthew Rezny wrote:
> On Tue, 07 Jan 2014 03:11:28 +0100
> John Marino <freebsd.contact at marino.st> wrote:
>> whoa - this is pretty harsh if you assume Torbjorn was sincere to
>> begin with, and I haven't seen anything that indicates he wasn't.
>> It's pretty much the definition of "no good deed goes unpunished".
>>
>> Yes, the criticism of "well, what exactly is wrong?" is valid, but the
>> guy did write a couple of PRs, so calling him a troll is way out of
>> line.  If it was planning on providing more information, I don't
>> expect he will now.
>>
>> John
> 
> I'm aware of the applicable PR only because Tijl mentioned it later in
> the thread. It is actually the PR that earned Torbjörn the troll label
> in my mind. Specifically this:
> "I was about to fix it, but found that the license of the code in
> question was unacceptable to me. I only contribute to Free Software,
> not to Open Source code bearing a license analogous to a law system
> that permits people to sell themselves as slaves."

Yes, if that's an accurate quote, it doesn't reflect well on Torbjorn.
However, if somebody read your post without the background information,
it could be interpreted that FreeBSD has harsh mail lists where devs
jump all over people trying to help.  (or manipulated by a BSD-hater to
make it look that way)


> From his email, he is simply unhelpful. Essentially just "you're
> different from GNU/Linux so you're broken but I won't bother to say
> how". Great, so helpful. It's when I get to the PR and see the bit of
> "I could fix it but I won't because you use the wrong license" that my
> troll alarm goes off. I could go on about how hypocritical it is to
> claim our m4 isn't Free Software when his project uses a far more
> onerous and vastly less-free license, but I'd just be preaching to the
> choir. Rather than call him out on the license crap, I opted to take a
> shortcut and simply troll him back with a bit of the ol' Learn2English.

Okay, so let's say he's correct and FreeBSD's base m4 can't build the
latest gmp.  Even if he won't tell us what the problem is, at least he
told us there is a problem which could be easily reproduced.  Granted,
he has the power to save us that time, but something is better than nothing.

I still don't believe that his intent was to troll, even if that is
basically the end result.  At least, I'm still willing to give him the
benefit of the doubt (despite the uncool license preaching in the PR.)

John