Someone from the FSF’s licencing department posted an official-looking thing saying they don’t believe GitHub’s new ToS to be problematic with copyleft. Well, my lawyer (not my personal one, nor for The MirOS Project, but related to another association, informally) does agree with my reading of the new ToS, and I can point out at least a clause in the GPLv1 (I really don’t have time right now) which says contrary (but does this mean the FSF generally waives the restrictions of the GPL for anything on GitHub?). I’ll eMail GitHub Legal directly and will try to continue getting this fixed (as soon as I have enough time for it) as I’ll otherwise be forced to force GitHub to remove stuff from me (but with someone else as original author) under GPL, such as… tinyirc and e3.

My dbconfig-common Debian packaging example got a rather hefty upgrade because dbconfig-common (unlike any other DB schema framework I know of) doesn’t apply the upgrades on a fresh install (and doesn’t automatically put the upgrades into a transaction either) but only upgrades between Debian package versions (which can be funny with backports, but AFAICT that part is handled correctly). I now append the upgrades to the initial-version-as-seen-in-the-source to generate the initial-version-as-shipped-in-the-binary-package (optionally, only if it’s named .in) removing all transaction stuff from the upgrade files and wrapping the whole shit in BEGIN; and COMMIT; after merging. (This should at least not break nōn-PostgreSQL databases and… well, database-like-ish things I cannot test for obvious (SQLite is illegal, at least in Germany, but potentially worldwide, and then PostgreSQL is the only remaining Open Source database left ;) reasons.)

Update: Yes, this does mean that maintainers of databases and webservers should send me patches to make this work with not-PostgreSQL (new install/name.in, upgrade files) and not-Apache-2.2/2.4 (new debian/*/*.conf snippets) to make this packaging example even more generally usable.

Natureshadow already forked this and made a Python/Flask package from it, so I’ll prod him to provide a similarly versatile hello-python-world example package.