Re: windows installer and COPYING

[Fyodor <fyodor () insecure org>]

On Wed, Dec 12, 2007 at 01:11:32AM +0000, jah wrote:
> I've been looking into whether it's possible/feasible to fix the font 
> used to display the license because the default used in nsis, I believe 
> is the default for the system on which the installer is executed.  Using 
> a fixed font and font size might dispense with the need to maintain a 
> separate COPYING as we'd be able to fit it properly in the available 
> field, but it would still break at higher dpi's used by short sighted 
> people and those installing nmap on computers attached to huge plasma 
> screens...

Thanks for the patch, Jah.  I do agree that the license agreement
looks terribly in the current installer, and I would like to fix that.
But I'd really like to avoid maintaining another version of the
copyright/license text just for this.  It is sure to go out of date,
which is particularly bad for a license file.  We currently maintain
the text in two places:

The source code templates -> Used at the top of each C source or
  include file, and in the COPYING file.  This one is surrounded by
  C-style comments.

The license.xml file -> Used to generate the man page in nroff and
  html format.  You can read this at
  http://insecure.org/nmap/man/man-legal.html .

So I'd like to find a solution which either adjusts the installer to
make one of these work as is (such as expanding the license text box
or reducing the font size) or uses an automated approach to create the
new file based on one of these sources.  For example, maybe there is
an nroff command which will create a version of the man page with the
right number of columns.  We could then just chop out the legal
notices section.  Or maybe a short script could remove the C comment
square from the COPYING file, which would probably fix the issue.

Cheers,
-F

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