[En-Nut-Discussion] RFC: Some kind of library for often needed functions

[Harald Kipp]

Ole Reinhardt wrote:
> Hi,
> 
>> What about "contrib" as the directory or repository name?
> 
> Sounds reasonable for me.

Such a directory exists already. In the BSD tradition this directory is
used for code distributed under incompatible licenses. It currently
contains the Helix MP3 software decoder.

You need to define specific license macros, like LICENSE_RPSL_RCSL for
the Helix decoder, to have this code build.

In general, libnutcontrib contains non-BSD code. Leaving this out
ensures, that your final binary is BSDL conformant.

>> Does it really make sense to include such code in the standard Nut/OS
>> distro? What about setting up an additional separate code repository for
>> these contributed packages?
> 
> Ok, problem is, that some of the internal NutOS code might also need to
> use these functions. Base64 decoding for example. So I would vote to add
> this code to the normal directory structure.

May be Henrik didn't understand, that we are talking about code-snippets
and functions with a few 100 lines only, typically far less than that.
I'd not like to have these simple routines under different licenses, as
they can be re-written quite easily.

For larger tasks, like audio coding or other complex compression
algorithms, or graphic libraries and stuff like that, it would be nice
to have them available for open source projects, where the license is no
issue. That's what the contrib library is for.

Like Ole, I recognized that we often need simple helper routines, which
do not really fit into any of the existing libraries.

Harald