[OE-core] [PATCH] parted_1.8.6.bb: add parted that not GPLv3

[Andre McCurdy]

On Fri, Jul 10, 2015 at 3:31 PM, Burton, Ross <ross.burton at intel.com> wrote:
>
> On 9 July 2015 at 12:38, Otavio Salvador <otavio at ossystems.com.br> wrote:
>>
>> Parted 1.8 is very old and not supported at all. The number of fixes
>> after it is such huge which makes Parted mostly useless in new storage
>> and disk formats. I see NO benefit in having it and a serious
>> maintenance burden.
>
> I wasn't aware the situation with the old parted was that bad...  maybe this
> should be in meta-oe (if anywhere) after all?

GPLv3 was released in June 2007 and most GNU packages transitioned to
it fairly quickly, so by definition, the pre-GPLv3 version of any GNU
package is now very old and unsupported. We do have a precedent for
keeping pre-GPLv3 versions alive though (a good thing for those of us
who need them!). What makes parted different from the other pre-GPLv3
packages which are already in oe-core?

Looking at the parted changelog, there have certainly been a lot of
bug fixes since 1.8.7 (the last GPLv2 version) but it's difficult to
tell how many are for functionality which would be relevant to a
typical embedded system.

  http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/parted.git/tree/NEWS

RHEL 5 seems to have been maintaining it's version of parted 1.8.1 up
until Jan 2013. RHEL's 33 patches might be a good source of fixes for
parted 1.8.7.

  http://vault.centos.org/5.11/os/SRPMS/parted-1.8.1-30.el5.src.rpm

As someone has volunteered to maintain the pre-GPLv3 parted recipe
(and I'll volunteer as a secondary maintainer, if that helps)
hopefully there would not be a "serious maintenance burden" on anyone
who doesn't have an interest in the older version.

>
> Ross
>
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