Clarification licence

[Adeline-Toader]

trafficstars

Hello! Can you please clarify if the licence of the project is GPL-2.0-or-later or GPL-2.0-only? GPL 2.0 or later would be really helpful to avoid many incompatibilities (such as Apache 2.0 or GPL 3.0) particularly that version 2 is a deprecated one, with several shortcomings. Many thanks for your support!

[Technologicat]

Right now due to historical reasons it's GPL v2.0 specifically, see the comments here.

I'm fine with relicensing my contributions, but there are several other contributors (see AUTHORS.md), and we would need to get permission for the license change from each one of them, or alternatively, rewrite the affected parts of the codebase.

If the license change is important to you, and if you want to gather such permissions, please go ahead.

Also, please note that Pyan has not been developed for years, and has never worked correctly for Python 3.7 and later. The analyzer only properly supports up to Python 3.6, which has been end-of-lifed quite a while back.

Pyan is also doing some things a static analyzer shouldn't, and the last_value mechanism is an absolute mess, so rather than continue developing Pyan, I think it might be better to take the lessons learned and write a new, simpler tool that gets the core things right. The module-level depencency analyzer modvis.py (in this repo) is perhaps too simple - the right thing to do is probably somewhere between that and the current complexity of Pyan.

The thing is, the nature of software development in research is such that I typically write more new code than maintain old codebases, so I haven't needed a tool like this for years. The only things I do semi-actively maintain are unpythonic and mcpyrate, and at least until now I've been familiar enough with them not to need an analyzer.

I'm looking for developers to take over Pyan, but not many have been interested, and those who have been, have not had the time to put into the project.