Re: Debian readline/libedit breakage

Markus Wanner wrote:
> Anybody realized that this Debian bug (and several others) got closed in
> the mean time (Sunday)? According to the changelog [1], Martin Pitt
> (which I'm CC'ing here, as he might not be aware of this thread, yet)
> worked around this issue by pre-loading readline via LD_PRELOAD for psql.
>
> Personally, I'm a bit suspicious about that solution (technically as
> well as from a licensing perspective), but it's probably the simplest
> way to let only psql link against readline.
>

This originated in
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=608442 , and from what
I'm reading there it sounds like Martin is inserting this as a
workaround but it hasn't passed through Debian Legal yet. I would
expect them to reject this as unacceptable. Dynamic linking via
LD_PRELOAD is still linking, even if it happens at runtime. I commend
Martin for buying some time here by doing that, but this doesn't change
the urgency to come up with an alternate solution much to me. As I see
it, that change could be reverted at any time via pushback from legal.

As far as working around this by releasing our own packages goes, that's
useful, but I'd also characterize that as only a workaround rather than
a real solution. OpenSSL is open-source, but it's not "free software"
via that standards of the FSF, which I feel is a completely reasonable
position given the license. When you depend on a software stack built
from unambiguously free software, having components that aren't you've
wedged in there and are dependent on is never a good idea. I won't
consider this truly resolved until GnuTLS support for PostgreSQL is in core.

--
Greg Smith 2ndQuadrant US greg(at)2ndQuadrant(dot)com Baltimore, MD
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