Debian violates GPL?
While in the process of getting Debian to work on the UltraSparc and
update all of the out of date packages, I came across a rather
alarming problem: there a quite a few binary packages in binary-sparc
(and binary-*) that don't have source. One example is
"glibc-pre2.1-2.0.100.orig.tar.gz", which disappeared from potato when
"glibc-pre2.1-2.0.105.orig.tar.gz" was uploaded (slink has an older
version).
The sparc distribution has 300 packages that are older versions than
the ones in slink which means that the source and/or diff files are
missing. This would violate the GPL.
The only solution to this that I can see is to change the install
script to only delete a source file if the reference count is zero...
Brian, is sparc frozen? I need to do an NMU of glibc-pre2.1 to get
Netscape to work. And I need to compile and upload the current slink
version of egcs (et al) to get C++ to link afterwords. The egcs in the
sparc distribution is older than the intel one.
Everything runs fine both with and without the newer egcs, but you
can't compile and link stuff with the new glibc and the current sparc
egcs. The sparc egcs is also out of date with respect to i386 slink
anyways.
What is the proceedure on doing uploads of major components like this?
Is there a leader for the sparc distribution? Is this a bad time? (I
need these components in before I upload recompiled versions of those
300 packages.)
The new glibc-pre2.1 is a minor tweak that affects only sparc, and the
egcs is compiled from the existing source in slink. Both are tested,
and are available in ~dunham/sparc on master, and
ftp://ftp.cse.msu.edu/pub/debian/
Steve
dunham@cse.msu.edu
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