Binary blobs in source packages

[Thomas Koch <thomas@koch.ro>]

Hi,

I just made a fool of myself on the simple-build-tool list by claiming that
Debian would build scala without scala. I only checked debian/rules and 
debian/control and since scala is in main, I assumed that I must be right.

However scala comes with a bytecode-compiled scala compiler in lib/ which is 
required only during build but not installed in the binary packages.

I already opened reportbug to fill a serious Debian Policy violation, but 
actually I couldn't find anything in the policy about it.

So is it ok to ship binaries in the source package that are only required 
during build? Can I do the same with simple-build-tool, which requires itself 
to build?

Regards,

Thomas Koch, http://www.koch.ro