[libvoikko] HFST packaging (WAS: Libvoikko 3.6, libreoffice-voikko 3.4)

[Sjur Moshagen]

5. sep. 2013 kl. 22:22 skrev Harri Pitkänen <hatapitk at iki.fi>:

> On Wednesday 22 May 2013 18:28:31 Timo Jyrinki wrote:
>> If anyone is planning / wants to package hfst & hfst-ospell to
>> Debian/Ubuntu, please ping me when it's there and libvoikko support for it
>> could be enabled. If needed, I can also certainly help with sponsoring -
>> that is, when you have a shiny, lintian clean packaging working with the
>> upstream tarball but lack upload rights.
> 
> I finally looked into this and found this in configure.ac of Hfst3 sources:
> 
>  AS_IF([test "x$with_foma" != "xno" -a "x$with_openfst" != "xno"],
>        [AC_MSG_WARN([foma licensing exception is limited to HFST team’s
>   redistribution; if you consider GPLv2 strict and Apache licence conflicting
>   you may not _redistribute_ your binaries])])
> 
> It looks like to be distributable (at least in Debian) it would be necessary 
> to disable support for Foma.
> 
> I'd like to know if there are any zhfst spellers that can be built if Hfst 
> tools are configured --without-foma? At least Omorfi failed to build for me. 
> If there are none, I think there is no sense in continuing this effort.

I don't follow. What needs to be (re)distributable is the hfst-ospell library. That part is completely independent of the hfst3 code, and thus also free of the possible Foma license conflict.

To build zhfst files you may need foma for some languages, potentially all Giellatekno/Divvun languages at the moment, but work is ongoing in the hfst camp to reimplement the functionality covered by Foma that is required by these languages. So future versions of the Giellatekno/Divvun languages should be independent of this license conflict too.

And lastly: I understand the license warning is about redistributing the hfst3 binaries, not the compiled language models in the zhfst binaries. This - in combination with the fact that hfst-ospell (on which the hfst support in libvoikko is built) has no dependency on Foma - makes me conclude that there is no problem for a hfst-enabled libvoikko being redistributed.

On the other hand:

If the requirement is that everything should be buildable from source, then I also don't see any problem - as long as you always distribute *only* the source for hfst3, and force every installation to build the hfst3 binaries each time. Then no hfst3 binaries are redistributed.

Or is there something I have missed?

Sjur