Re: Moving some lisp/ob-*.el files to org-contrib - your advice?

[Bastien <bzg@gnu.org>]

Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com> writes:

> +1 on this and the list of proposed languages.

Thanks for the feedback.

> Do any of these ob-* files have FSF copyright i.e. author assigned
> copyright to FSF. Just wondering, given the contrib package will live in
> non-gnu repo, if this is something we need to be concerned about or not?

All these ob-*.el files are part of Org core, so they are part of
Emacs and require the authors to sign the FSF papers.

So there is no real problem here.

org-contrib.git contains files with a free software license: most of
them are GPLv3+, a few of them GPVv2(+) and one (or two, from memory)
is using a MIT license.  So there is no blocker for org-contrib.git
to be packaged as a NonGNU package.

> Strikes me there is nothing written in stone here, so if a language
> becomes popular and it has maintainers, we can always review the
> decision to move it 'out' and when justified, move back into core.

Yes - on the other hand, we don't want to move files out of Org's core
too often.

> I think it is good having a clear distinction and the idea that if your
> using a contrib package, it is 'best effort only' and not guaranteed to
> work with the most recent org version compared to 'core', which has an
> expectation it works with most recent org version.

Yes, this is also the idea.  That's why I called for more maintainers
for the ob-*.el files, but we're not there yet, and for now it would
be too drastic IMHO to remove some ob-*.el for which we don't have a
maintainer or we are not 100% sure they are compatible.  But luckily
enough, I don't think backward compatibility problems happen often
with Babel files.

-- 
 Bastien