[cairo] COPYING files....

[Egbert Eich]

Carl Worth writes:
 > On Feb 6, Jim Gettys wrote:
 >  > We need to put into place COPYING files for all the new modularized
 >  > packages ASAP; some currently lack this.
 > 
 > The cairo COPYING files seem to be in place at least.

Each individual source file should bear a Copyright notice and a
license information which in case of the MIT license text is
customized with the copyright holder's name.
Therefore I don't know how relevant a general COPYING file will be.
If it is relevant at all it may not even be a good idea to have one
- especially with the recent history in mind. 

 > 
 > 
 > You can read between the lines and see that the default "strictness"
 > is --gnu, not --foreign, and that --gnu does require a COPYING
 > file. And there is the one phrase:
 > 
 > 	We still encourage software authors to distribute
 > 	their work under terms like those of the GPL, but
 > 	doing so is not required to use Automake.
 > 
 > But the behavior still feels rather sneaky to me.
 > 

Automake was designed specifically to meet the needs to FSF projects.
It is made to meet the GNU Makefile.in standard and also some other 
FSF requirements and it has special rules for generating documentation
from texinfo files as well as building binary .elc files for emacs 
list from .el files. While these are all requirements for FSF projects
there are no rules for generating/converting X specific file types
and I don't see how automake can be extended for these.

Therefore automake may not be the optimal tool for building X modules.

Egbert.