On Dec 1, 10:35am, cinnion@ka8zrt.com (Douglas Wade Needham) wrote:
-- Subject: Question about rdist

| Greetings everyone,
| 
| I have been using the version of RDist (v6) from Magnicomp, which is
| Michael Cooper's company, since 1998.  Since I was affected by the
| latest round of layoffs at Lucent, I decided to finish putting it and
| a few other packages into my local additions to pkgsrc, rather than
| just carrying them forward via a copy of my /usr/local tree.  I also
| saw that we have net/freerdist, but I figured going with the original
| author's version was probably better in the long run.  However, while
| doing this, I was faced with the issue of /usr/bin/rdist vs. the new
| executable, and the following question occurred to me:
| 
|    Michael Cooper (as Magnicomp) reverted his original work back to 
|    a BSD form license.  Has any thought been given to pulling the
|    RDist from his site just as we pull GCC, Sendmail, etc. from other
|    sites and using it to replace the v3 version we currently have?
| 
| Thanks!
| 
| - Doug

Well, from what I see Michael incorporated a lot of fixes from
freerdist for rdist version 7 which is now in beta. The major
advantage from freerdist is that it uses gnu autoconf. I have not
compared the sources to see what fixes one has that the other does
not, but I don't see any significant changes in the changelog In
this particular case, the reason freerdist exists is because Michael
Cooper decided to change the license at some point in order to make
money out of it. I don't see an open cvs repository for it right
now under magnicomp's web site, and I don't know if Michael is
planning to make the source private again, so I prefer to keep
freerdist alive until we have some warranty that:

	- the source will not become private again
	- there is public cvs access
	- commit access to the cvs tree is granted to people
	  outside magnicomp

I know that I don't provide 2+3, but I've never been asked to.

Finally, I wanted to provide /usr/bin/rdist to be rdist 6, but then
I also wanted to keep /usr/old/rdist around. But we did not have /usr/old
so I punted. This was years ago, and I am not sure if /usr/bin/rdist is
relevant anymore (I think that very few people actually use it, and they
could easily port to version 6).

christos