Restore COPYING

[jamesjer]

The old tarball had a COPYING file containing the text of GPLv3. That file did not make the transition to github, it seems.

[olexandr-konovalov]

Thanks - this will also tick a box in #1. Where is the old tarball so we can check?

[jamesjer]

I'm afraid I don't know how to find the old tarball anymore. I've got a copy I downloaded in 2015 for the purposes of creating a carat package for Fedora. It's up in the Fedora build system, but I don't know if there is a way for the general public to access it. If you know how to unpack an RPM, you can get it out of the latest build: https://kojipkgs.fedoraproject.org/packages/carat/2.1b1.19.07.2008/13.fc31/src/carat-2.1b1.19.07.2008-13.fc31.src.rpm

[olexandr-konovalov]

Indeed https://web.archive.org/web/20160817084957/http://wwwb.math.rwth-aachen.de/carat/carat.tgz has COPYING with GPLv3. Perhaps there were different archives lying around when this repository was created...

[jamesjer]

Oh yes, I remember now. On May 18, 2015 I sent an email to the carat maintainers with a few patches, and I asked about the license at that time. They created a new tarball on May 21 with the license file and the patches applied, but did not change either the version number or the name of the tarball. I thought at the time that that was a bad idea....

[gaehler]

My GAP package Carat version 2.2.3 contains that tarball, including the COPYING file.

[olexandr-konovalov]

Glad that we have evidence and memories :) Is there anything else in that tarball? What about those few patches - are they still relevant, already applied, or obsolete?

[jamesjer]

Kind of a mix, I'm afraid. Some parts were fixed anew in the recent warning cleanup commit, some are still as they were originally. I just submitted pull request #34, which applies the rest and does some additional warning cleanup.

[fingolfin]

I just merged PR #34 (didn't even know I had the permissions to do that ;-).

We actually got permission to put this code under GPL 2 or later, so I think we should do that. I just created PR #39 to this end