OpenSSL in Python (move to variant?)

[Dan Ports]

On Tue, Nov 22, 2011 at 07:50:00PM -0600, Eric A. Borisch wrote:
> OpenSSL's license negatively impacts the usefulness of the binary
> distribution process within MacPorts. I propose moving openssl support
> to a non-default variant within the pythonNN ports. This will permit
> more of the packages that depend on python to be distributable through
> binary packages.

Thanks for bringing this up. I've run up against this before, and I
think this is an important issue. The python -> openssl dependency is a
pretty common reason for ports to falsely fail the license check. (The
most common, of course, is not having a license tag at all -- but we've
made a lot of progress on that one recently!)

A similar issue is that both Python and perl depend on gdbm for one of
their standard library modules. gdbm has a GPL-3+ license, so it
conflicts with anything that's GPL-2 only.

I'm not particularly thrilled by the idea of disabling openssl (or
gdbm) from Python. I assume this means it's not going to build the ssl
standard library module, and I think it could be pretty surprising for
users if it suddenly disappeared from the port.

The way I'd prefer to deal with it is to have an option to skip the
license check for a particular dependency (say,
depends_skip_licensecheck). We could use this to ignore the
python -> openssl dependency, since most ports that depend on Python
aren't depending on the ssl module. Of course, we'd have to be careful
with manually checking the few ports that actually do use Python's ssl
module...

This option would come in handy in other cases too -- I know I've come
across ports that have recommend or otherwise depend on other ports,
but not in a way that could be construed to create a derivative work. 
(I can't think of an example offhand, though.)

Dan

-- 
Dan R. K. Ports              MIT CSAIL                http://drkp.net/