[Development] Minified javascript libraries in Qt source code

Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer perezmeyer at gmail.com
Sat Sep 28 03:54:58 CEST 2013


On Friday 27 September 2013 11:08:03 Thiago Macieira wrote:
> On sexta-feira, 27 de setembro de 2013 18:12:32, Pau Garcia i Quiles wrote:
> > On 27-Sep-2013 11:55 AM, "Jonathan Riddell" <jriddell at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> > > This also means we can't ship it in Ubuntu, preferred modifiable form is
> > 
> > a requirement for free software
> > 
> > > >  d) Ship the libraries unmodified from upstream and include a link to
> > 
> > where
> > 
> > > > they were obtained and where to obtain the non-minified sources.
> > > 
> > > Pointing to somewhere else is not a valid way of providing a preferred
> > > modifiable form because the link might get new versions or disappear.
> > 
> > A good compromise is shipping both minified (for users) and unminified
> > (for
> > distributions). That's what I'm doing with Wt in Debian.
> 
> I understand, I'm just asking what the BKM for this should be.
> 
> For example, suppose we ship icons from a free set. Suppose the artists who
> made the icons prefer to use SVG or Photoshop-specific file formats (PSD)
> and suppose those are also available. But we can't use SVG, we need PNG, so
> we ship the flattened, rasterised PNG files.
> 
> Should we also include the SVG/PSD files?

This is a nice example, thanks Thiago for it. I think the problem here is to 
correctly define "best".

We can say that "best" is do the minimum required to comply with the license. 
If so, maybe shipping just the PNGs is just fine.

But we can also say that "best" is letting whoever downloads a tarball from 
us, and that tarball + a compiler is enough to build the whole project, be 
able to change whatever she wants without the need to get another tarball.

Now my personal definition of "best" is the second one. So yes, I would 
include the SVG/PSD files and generate the PNGs from there on build time (much 
as KDE does with icons, although there are other reasons there). I understand 
that not everyone will agree with me, but I also know that there are lots of 
people who does. That's why distros like Debian or Ubuntu enforce this.

I don't know what's the Qt-project position with respect those cases. If there 
is a explicit one, I missed it (pointers welcomed!) If not, this might be the 
best moment to define it.

On the other hand, WRT Qt4's webkit-fancybrowser-jquery-qrc.html and webkit-
fancybrowser-jquery-min-js.html, I think doc is not GFDL but GPL. If so, we 
might have an issue here with the embedded jquery. Please note that I still 
need to fully check this, $JOB hasn't been giving me much time for this ;-)

Kinds regards, Lisandro.

-- 
$ make war
make: *** No rule to make target `war'.  Stop.  Try `love' instead
  David Gravereaux

Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer
http://perezmeyer.com.ar/
http://perezmeyer.blogspot.com/
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