Better proxy support available via libcurl?

[David Shaw]

On Thu, Aug 03, 2006 at 03:28:09PM +0200, Werner Koch wrote:
> On Thu,  3 Aug 2006 15:08, David Shaw said:
> 
> > These are good objections, but I don't know how well they apply in the
> > GPG case.  Judging by the ChangeLogs, GPG (at least 1.4.x) does not
> 
> It is not actually a problem as the FSF holds copyright assignments.
> So they would need to decide unless I decide that for technical
> reasons we need to change the license.
> 
> > gpgkeys_curl, and gpgkeys_hkp?  They're separate programs that
> > communicate via pipes (the classic example of the barrier that the GPL
> > does not cross).  Their licensing need not be the same as the gpg
> 
> That is a common misunderstanding.  The GPL does not specify the
> technical terms what makes up a derivative work.  In many cases the
> process boundary is good guess but not always true.  In our case the
> keyserver helpers have been written has part of gpg and are designed
> to work with them.  They are not intended as a separate tool.  Thus I
> won't see that as a mere aggregation.

That's not the case though - they were designed intentionally to be
able to run outside of GPG for general keyserver access.  That's one
of the reasons the communications were versioned: if gpgkeys_* were
strictly part of GPG, then there would be no reason to version the
communications, as a GPG update would always give you the matching
helpers.  One of the front-ends was using this ability (was it
WinPT?).  Jason Harris also has a package that calls them directly.

gpgkeys_* is not a derivative work of GPG.  We could easily make
gpgkeys_* a whole new package if necessary.  Just like GnuPG 1.9 is
made up of a bunch of smaller packages, the keyserver helpers could be
a small package that works with (and is presumably included with)
GnuPG.

> As we can't solve this problem right now and given that this is a
> general problem not related only to GnuPG, I suggest that we suspend
> this problem for now and wait for the GPLv3 which might help to fix
> the problem.  I will open a bug so that we don't forget about it.
> 
> Okay?

Valid questions have been raised about distributing binaries.  I'm
certainly okay with doing nothing, so long as it isn't going to leave
us in a state where people can't or won't package and distribute
GnuPG for fear of violating the license.

David