MySQL Bugs: #74250: incomplete source archive; please ensure GPL compliance of the source tarball

Bug #74250	incomplete source archive; please ensure GPL compliance of the source tarball
Submitted:	7 Oct 2014 13:59	Modified:	14 Oct 2014 22:12
Reporter:	Dmitry Smirnov	Email Updates:
Status:	Verified	Impact on me:	None
Category:	MySQL Workbench	Severity:	S3 (Non-critical)
Version:	6.2.3	OS:	Any
Assigned to:		CPU Architecture:	Any
Tags:	GPL

Description:
Once again MySQL Workbench source archive ship generated source-less files.
From quick look it seems that most (or all) of them are in "/generated" folder. In particular "generated/grti/*" files are marked as generated but they are not built by the build system and their sources (and/or build scripts) seems to be missing. Interestingly, bits that suppose to be building those files are commented in "CMakeLists.txt". Also "generated/README.txt" mention "generate.cmd" which is not included to source archive.

This is not the first time such issues are neglected. I can't stress enough the importance of GPL compliance (i.e. all source files and/or build scripts should be present). It is also a strict requirement of Debian DFSG.

Such issues can easily get MySQL Workbench removed from Debian and other GNU/Linux distributions.

Besides re-generation of all source files is important to for successful build on all architectures.

How to repeat:
Try to re-build files in "generated" folder.

Hi Dmitry,

The WB package has everything that's needed to both develop and build WB, except for 3rd party dependencies.

I'll explain how these file come to be:
The files in generated/grts are created from the XML files in res/grt/. They are generated by the tool in tools/genobj. Because we seldom regenerate these files and because regenerating has a circular dependency we regenerate them only when the XML is modified. The circular dependency is because to compile tools/genobj, you need these headers in generated/grts (even if they're outdated). And to generate the files in generated/grts, you need tools/genobj :) So you do need the files in generated/grts to be in the source package.

One may say that's a nasty situation, but that's just how the project ended up evolving. Also, I think this wouldn't qualify as a GPL violation, since it's not like we're taking someone else's code and shipping without sources; in fact the whole sources are in the src.tar.gz and we're not holding away anything (except for a couple of commercial plugins, which have nothing to do with this).

generated/grti is in a similar situation, although they're instead generated from the files in modules/interfaces (we've kind of obsoleted that stuff ourselves, tho).

If you think that this *really* is a big problem for Debian, we can spend a couple of days finding a solution for this, as a show of good faith. But anyone can build from sources just like us and anyone can regenerate these headers, the same way we do (do a normal full build of WB using included headers, build tools/genobj, then go to generated/ and type make to regenerate the headers).

As far as I  can understand a contradicting conclusion was reached here:
http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=74227

-- Peter
-- not a MySQL/Oracle person.

Peter, 

* we are Oracle, not Microsoft
* Oracle does not own the *Microsoft* Visual Studio runtime redistributables, neither in binary much less in source form
* We have been advised to not redistribute MS binaries, because it could violate Microsoft's EULA
* So... I don't see how this has anything to do with the bug you linked?

Hi Alfredo,

Thank you for explanation. Circular dependency in source is an unusual problem.
Certainly it is not as bad as source-less files so I'm downgrading bug's severity.
IMHO it is worth fixing when convenient, perhaps after when more important issues like #74147 and #74241 are addressed...

In general including pre-generated files to source archive is a bad practice just like including any kind of binary blobs that are not meant to be (directly) modified by humans. IMHO not rebuilding those files is a defect of build system. It would be nice to fix it eventually.