Am Samstag, den 04.06.2011, 14:10 +0200 schrieb Gergely Nagy: > Jonas Smedegaard <dr@jones.dk> writes: > > > I have noticed several times package changes like the following (from > > cairomm entering testing today): > > > > * debian/control: > > - Drop build dependencies on doxygen and graphviz, since upstream > > now ships the generated documentation > > > > > > Feels wrong to me to redistribute when e.g. html files clearly are not > > the preferred form of editing for upstream. > > To me, that doesn't sound all that troubling: we do use other generated > files that upstream ships more often than not: configure, Makefile.ins - > and so on. Though, those are rarely shipped in the binary package, but > still: we do not build-depend on the tools that generate these. > > Technically, upstream could do anything in those files, write them by > hand instead of generating from configure.ac, and include that in the > distributed tarball, potentially under a non-free license. > > In any case: even if upstream shipts generated content, as long as the > source is shipped aswell, all is fine and well, in my opinion. The > _source_ needs to be in the preferred form of modification. If it > contains generated files aswell, that doesn't matter all that much: the > source is still there. You just don't have to use it, if the result > would be the same anyway. It's better to build the pre-generated files from source in case you need to modify the source. It's easier to just modify for example configure.ac instead of modifying it and figuring out how to rebuild the pre-generated files, especially when you do security fixes or stable release updates. -- Benjamin Drung Debian & Ubuntu Developer
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