Release plans

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Uwe Brauer writes:
 > >> Regarding Re: Release plans; "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen at xemacs.org> adds:
 > 
 >    > Uwe Brauer writes:
 > 
 >    > Not until there are GPLv3+ packages, of which there are none
 >    > currently.
 > 
 > 
 > BTW how is the transition from GPLv2+ to GPLv3+ for the
 > package system supposed to work?

People who have packages to migrate will do so as they sync the code.

 > I suppose we need a branch at some point, since we are not
 > going to change the license of _all_ packages at once,

As a practical matter, probably not (especially not if upstream is
still active but developing under GPLv2+).  But there's no reason not
to, except for the effort involved.

I guess I would like it if Norbert would roll a "last GPLv2-compatible
SUMO" that we can recommend as appropriate for 21.4 users just before
we start migrating packages to GPLv3+.  But we can always just use the
latest available one.

 > and we can't release some packages with GPLv3+ and others with
 > GPLv2+.

I don't think this is really a problem.  Individual components can
have more permissive licenses as long as the whole is distributable
under GPLv3+.  It's not even certain that the SUMO must be distributed
under GPLv3+ just because it includes a GPLv3+ package (it might pass
as "mere aggregation").

So in fact it's not obvious to me that we *must* migrate 21.5 to
GPLv3+ before migrating packages.  But it seem somewhat less likely to
annoy the FSF, and we want to do this anyway so we can sync 21.5 to
recent GNU Emacs.

The only real issue is that if we migrate something like semantic to
GPLv3+, then anything that depends on it needs to be GPLv3+