Re: Ok to use upstream doumentation as-is (i.e. not regenerate)?
I'm leaning towards regenerating all mechanically generated files
(including autotools stuff). I think it helps us live up to our
promises (SC items 1-4, DFSG item 2).
As an example of what I mean; the game naev was proposed to be added
to Debian. Looking at the images I noted that some of them looked like
renderings of 3D models. It turns out upstream was storing
pre-rendered images in their git repository and the models etc in
another git repository. Even worse is that they haven't been generated
recently and now they cannot be generated any more because the blender
API has changed incompatibly.
I've read somewhere that some Debian users appreciate our dedication
to fixing FTBFS bugs since they reduce headaches when trying to modify
and rebuild our packages. If we don't rebuild from source we aren't
ensuring that our users have such essential freedoms as being able to
modify our source packages and have their modifications be represented
in the resulting binary packages.
It is important to ask questions when looking at the material
distributed by upstream, especially when it is not the usual stuff
free software developers are used to dealing with (programming
languages and executables). Finding out what the source code is can be
a hard problem, even for programs (cf #383465), some tips for finding
cases of non-program material with missing source code or non-free
bits:
Docs:
PDFs can embed fonts, which might be non-free.
Check the metadata, it might indicate how it was produced and that
there is something (TeX or Microsoft Word docs) missing.
Images:
3D model renderings might indicate some blender or other models are missing.
text in the image can indicate a font is missing or a non-free font
might have been used.
metadata indicating they were created in Inkscape or GIMP can mean
that an SVG or XCF file is missing. Similarly for any files mentioning
Adobe products.
Audio:
Ogg/Mp3 means the original audio isn't present or was thrown away.
metadata in these files might indicate that some non-free audio
programs or non-free audio samples were used to generate the audio.
--
bye,
pabs
http://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise
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