Re: Problems with source-orphan documents in dialign-t
On Mon, 19 Nov 2007, Charles Plessy wrote:
Of course, I share your opinion. I do think that, since all in the
upstream tarball is free, it should go in main. It just seems that
either Debian as a whole disagrees, or that the majority is not
interested in overrulling the members of the ftpmaster team for such
rare corner cases.
Well, I have to support ftp master here: If you have to handle 10000+x
packages you will meet several corner cases and it is hard to decide
which corner case to handle with what we in this case would call
"common sense" or "more relaxed" or whatever. The problem is that the
border line what to accept and what not becomes faded and if some
crazy lawyer decides to spend his time to sue Debian these rare
corner cases might fire back. Ftp master is responsible that this
is prevented and thus from his perspective the rejection is perfectly
right and in the sense of Debian as a whole.
I really do not like to remove files from an upstream archive in these
cases where there is not any benefit for the user.
IMHO, not our source tarball is the main target for the user but the
binary package. Users who are regarding the source tarball as the
most interesting piece of a distribution will probably use Gentoo or
something else. I can not see a relevant drawback for the user if
all needed information is contained in the final binary package.
I think that we
should restrict our modifications to the meaningful ones.
In the sense I gave above it is a meaningful one.
By forking more and more upstream tarballs, we increase the signal/noise
ratio.
To prevent this we try to educate upstream to prepare proper tarballs
and send patches. It is not really our fault if upstream ignores this
kind of enhancement.
If
each and every file in the upstream tarball is free, why removing any ?
This is not like when a copyrighted article is included with the
program.
How can you know? Are you sure that the source of the docs does not
contain a different Copyright statement? Well, common sense implies
that it is not the case, but as I tried to explain that common sense
does not apply here very well.
And, BTW, I really do not like tarballs that have executable bit set
for every file and even worse rubish like "doc/*.log" (yes, the _file_
has the '*' this is not wildcard). So I would probably go farther and
would change file permissions when touching the tarball anyway. Please
try to convince upstream that he might use proper permissions in his
tarball.
Actually, just a link to our SVN.
It might be that people who have no idea about proper file permissions
have also no idea about working with svn - but I might be wrong here.
If I were you I would try to fix the tarball in the following way:
- replace the content of the doc directory by your XML and a
proper Makefile that builds all needed formats
(you might decide to include the targets of this Makefile)
- Fix file permissions
Put this tarball for download onto a web page (I'd volunteer to put
this into my people.d.o space). Suggest upstream to take over this
tarball for future versions.
Kind regards
Andreas.
--
http://fam-tille.de
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