Re: miscutils snag/questions for all
> * The miscutils come from the util-linux distribution maintained by
> Rik Faith and others.
I think Ian Murdock tried to get the sources from _outside_ of BOGUS
where possible, because BOGUS did not contain the thorough copyright
and attribution information for each program that we feel is necessary
to have legal documentation of our right to distribute the software.
Sigh. At this point don't assume that the upstream source for everything
in miscutils is BOGUS, even if BOGUS contains the same programs.
Rik Faith points us to his Notes files for attribution information, but
I don't think we've found all of the answers we need there about where
the individual programs come from and what their copyrights are.
As a rule of thumb, if you can get a program from the most-upstream
source - for example the person who contributed it to BOGUS instead
of BOGUS, get it from that source.
> * util-linux 2.5 contains _much_ more than miscutils; specifically, it
> contains stuff to be found in these debian packages:
> bsdutils, mount, syslogd, chfn, last, and others.
It's a mess. I wish that all of the programs we need from util-linux
were distributed separately, that way we could package them individually.
I'd prefer to split util-linux into smaller packages, if you have time
to do that.
> * Some important util-linux 2.5 utilities are missing from Debian, such as
> setterm, ipcs, ipcrm, etc. Copyright permitting, I would like to add
> these packages (as appropriate) to miscutils.
Please make sure you have proper documentation of their copyrights and
authors names.
> * I'm not sure how to approach the diff problem. Surely I do not want
> to leave all of the unused source files from util-linux in the debian
> miscutils package. Should the diffs make these files empty?
I think the problem here is that this is really our own version now
and not something that can be traced to a single upstream source.
Thus, diffs aren't as useful.
> * Should I just throw away the idea of providing diffs?
Don't kill yourself over them.
> * Should we consider merging bsdutils and miscutils into one package?
No. There is a source for the BSD programs with better trace-ability of
the copyrights on the individual programs. Use the BSD versions rather
than the miscutils versions.
> Any ideas to help make miscutils a better, cleaner package are welcome.
I think it's too big.
Thanks
Bruce
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