Re: ag, **, and the GPL

From: David Turner <dturner@twopensource.com>
Date: Nov 18, 2014, 17:57 UTC
Message-ID: <1416333456.27401.1.camel@leckie>
In-Reply-To: <CACr0F2iGY_vxWzsNaPQNJ2cLUDRZPS70i79EhyA9OkA7qLaUQQ@mail.gmail.com>

On Mon, 2014-11-17 at 20:50 -0800, Matthew Kaniaris wrote:

Show 11 quoted lines

> The Silver Search (https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher), is
> a small, open source, cross platform searching utility written as a
> replacement for ack.  One of the major benefits of Ag (and a source
> for much of its speed) is that it obeys .gitignore.  However, Ag
> currently treats gitignores as regexs which produces incorrect results
> for e.g. **.  I'd like to add support to ag to obey the .gitignore
> spec but I'm not keen on implementing yet another fnmatch clone.  Ag
> is licensed under the Apache License Version 2.0 which to the best of
> my understanding is incompatible with the GPLv2.  Would you grant me
> permission to reuse wildmatch.c (and necessary includes) for use in
> Ag?

I already implemented this without using any git code at https://github.com/novalis/the_silver_searcher. The patch was rejected because it slowed down ag slightly (or perhaps because it was overly complex).