[sword-devel] FTPlib

[Chris Little]

Can someone elucidate the function/need for FTPlib in the source tree? 
It seems to me like there are a lot of reasons why it doesn't belong 
there and I can't come up with any reasons why it should be.

1) It's GPL-licensed code for which we don't own the copyright, which 
violates our policy of only accepting material into the source tree if 
CrossWire owns the copyright or the material has BSD/MIT-type licensing.

2) There appear to be unidentified "changes made by Lorn Potter 
<llornkcor at handhelds.org>". The purpose of these changes isn't 
explained. Nor are the reasons for which the modified version was chosen 
over the official release of FTPlib.

3) One effect of the changes is that it takes a nice cross-platform 
library and turns it into a Unix/Linux-only library.

4) Looking through the mailing list archive, it looks like FTPlib has 
been the source of a lot of build problems.


I would really like to see FTPlib disappear from our source tree after 
.10 is released. If it is felt to be genuinely necessary that we have 
FTP support (potentially) built into the library, I think it should 
probably be via CURL.

--Chris