[Xapian-discuss] PHP bindings under Fedora Core

[Olly Betts]

On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 04:07:43PM +0100, Tim Brody wrote:
> I couldn't find Xapian bindings for FC10 so I wrote a little howto for
> building them from the FC10 source RPMs:
> http://oapeon.blogspot.com/2009/06/building-xapian-bindings-php-under.html

Fedora don't package them because of concerns about licence
incompatibility between the GPL and the PHP licence.  This is the ticket
in our bug tracker about this (but note that the situation was
originally much worse due to SWIG inserting unjustified PHP licence
boilerplate into generated files):

http://trac.xapian.org/ticket/191

This issue was raised against the Debian package and discussion on
debian-legal suggested that they probably are incompatible, though
there's a possibility GPLv3 and PHP may be compatible, in which case
you can use Xapian under GPLv3 (via the upgrade clause in GPLv2).  I'm
currently waiting from a response to a query with the FSF as to their
take on that.

My understanding is that distributing the xapian-bindings sources is
probably still OK, it's just binaries that are problematic.  So your
HOWTO is very useful (though it might be simpler to start from the
xapian-bindings source tarball which contains a spec file with PHP
support).

If GPLv3 doesn't help, then this is only likely to get resolved when
we get to the point where we've replaced all the non-relicensable code
in Xapian.

Cheers,
    Olly