Bug#830978: Browserified javascript and DFSG 2
Sam Hartman writes ("Bug#830978: Browserified javascript and DFSG 2"):
> Speaking as an individual TC member, here's my personal reading of the
> TC discussion.
>
> It's not clear that the TC is the right body for this discussion. We
> certainly could offer advice, but it's not clear that the ftpmasters or
> release team--the parties most likely to need such advice-- would
> benefit from our advice.
I would like to comment briefly on the general idea about the TC
offering advice and making statements of opinion.
If someone in authority in the project, such as a maintainer of the
ftpmasters or the release team, is doing something which the TC thinks
is wrong, then (if the question is important) I think it would be
entirely appropriate for the TC to issue a statement of opinion,
disagreeing with the other authority.
Conversely, if a contributor has been criticised, they may welcome a
message of support from the TC. That may help lay to rest an
unfounded criticism and save the contributor the energy required to
wonder whether they're really right, rebut any public criticisms, and
so on.
And finally if a question needs authoritative input but the relevant
authority in Debian has not made a clear decision, TC involvement
might help get the matter properly resolved.
In this case I think that it would be worth TC members considering,
for themselves, briefly, and without too much back-and-forth enquiry,
what their initial assessments of the merits of the situation are.
If TC members feel that the submitter of #817092 (Luke, who is
complaining that the aggregated file is not source, along with Ben,
Jonas etc.) are right, they could ask the release team and the
ftpmasters (informally, perhaps) whether the release team would
welcome a supportive TC intervention.
That would allow the TC to help settle this long-running question
(which keeps coming up on -devel and is frankly quite annoying).
This is true even though it seems the specific case of
libjs-handlebars has a more clear-cut problem, as found by Ansgar and
described in #830986.
Concretely, as one of the people who agree with the submitter of
#817092, I would like to see the TC pass a resolution along these
lines:
The TC gives a non-binding statement of opinion:
* The point of having the source code (with an appropriate licence
etc.) is so that all our contributors, downstreams, and users are
able to modify the code and to share their modifications with each
other, with Debian, and with upstream.
* In particular, Debian will often want to share modifications with
upstream, which means that we need to be working with the software
in a form which lets us do so.
* For Debian, therefore, the source code for a file or program is the
form which can be conveniently modified and shared; specifically,
the form in which upstream will accept patches.
* There may be exceptions to this principle but none of them apply in
the case of libjs-handlebars. We do not expect that any such
exception would be applicable to other concatenated or
`browserified' JavaScript files generated with tools like Grunt,
even if the JavaScript output is not minified or obfuscated.
* So in the case of bug #817092 against libjs-handlebars, the
concatened JavaScript is not, in our opinion, source code. This
would remain true even if the parser-generator input mentioned in
bug #830986 were available.
I think this would help save debian-devel a lot of annoying threads.
Ian.
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