Re: snippets [was Re: Respect for Upstream Authors and Snippets of Interest]

[Dylan Thurston <dpt@math.harvard.edu>]

On 2003-09-28, Barak Pearlmutter <barak@cs.may.ie> wrote:
> If we decide to go on a crusade against them, it would be a really big
> deal for a couple reasons:
>
>  - Debian is absolutely *rife* with such snippets.
>  - This is because upstream tarballs are absolutely rife with them.
>  - Scanning our sources for them would be a gargantuan undertaking.
>  - They'd keep sneaking back in.

All of these apply to ordinary bugs much better than to snippets.  The
number of bugs in a typical upstream tarball vastly exceeds the number
of snippets, for instance, and are much harder to find..  For those
keeping score, I've omitted these two:

>  - It would be a major change in practice.
>  - No other free software organization eschews such snippets.

I disagree with the premises of those two, as well.  For instance: no
other free software organization edits out the non-free fonts from
XFree86 or the non-free firmware from the linux kernel; and this seems
like a relatively minor change, as changes in Debian go.

Peace,
	Dylan