User talk:LuisVilla

FastStringSearch
Hello Luis, Tim Starling's FastStringSearch is very useful but not used often enough. One reason is this note it contains: Several source files were taken from GNU grep, and are under the GNU General Public License. The PHP license is incompatible, so a PHP binary containing this extension is probably not redistributable under any license. I know you're busy; but, if you can keep this issue in some corner of your mind, maybe one day a simple solution will strike you all of a sudden: in that case, please let us know so that at some point someone can package it and we can ship it for everyone's profit. :) Thanks, Nemo 13:46, 5 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Oy... that's a challenging problem. Thanks for flagging it for me, I'll try to find some time to think it through and see if there is anything creative there. Probably not, though, unless we wanted to ask FSF very, very nicely to relicense the files, which they do very rarely :( (For my own future reference: actual source. -LuisVilla (talk) 18:53, 5 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Ouch, that looks hard indeed. Thanks! --Nemo 18:56, 5 January 2014 (UTC)
 * It was rejected for distribution in PECL for this reason: http://news.php.net/php.pecl.dev/4021 -- Tim Starling (talk) 12:45, 14 January 2014 (UTC)
 * You didn't happen to reach out to FSF about it at that point, did you? —LuisVilla (talk) 14:40, 14 January 2014 (UTC)
 * No. IIRC, I was told that in the past, PHP community members had tried asking FSF for relicensing of other components, without the slightest success. kwset.c is only 786 lines -- it would probably be easier to rewrite it than to get the FSF to relicense it. -- Tim Starling (talk) 06:53, 15 January 2014 (UTC)
 * They've gotten slightly less hardcore about it over the years. Admittedly only slightly :) Is it really just the one file? —LVilla (WMF) (talk) 19:24, 15 January 2014 (UTC)
 * It's one file plus a custom memory allocator (obstack.c) which presumably would not be used in a rewrite. The code is fairly dense and technical, so it's a more difficult task than a typical 786 line file we might deal with. -- Tim Starling (talk) 18:23, 21 January 2014 (UTC)
 * I didn't mean to demean the work or anything; I know "just one file" can represent a lot of work :) Just that it is easier to ask for a relicensing when it is just one file to work through the history of. -LVilla (WMF) (talk) 18:31, 21 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Well, for relicensing purposes, we are using four files: kwset.c, kwset.h, obstack.c and obstack.h. It looks like obstack.c/h is already LGPL, since it is in libiberty, despite the fact that it is marked GPL in the copy bundled with grep. So if kwset.c/h were relicensed to LGPL as well, we could probably make a redistributable binary. -- Tim Starling (talk) 01:03, 22 January 2014 (UTC)