Re: Debian violates GPL?
James Troup <james@nocrew.org> writes:
> Jim Pick <jim@jimpick.com> writes:
>
> > Hamish Moffatt <hamish@debian.org> writes:
> >
> > > On Sat, Dec 19, 1998 at 01:01:50AM +0100, Richard Braakman wrote:
> > > > Steve Dunham wrote:
> > > > > IMHO, the best solution is to keep any diff file and .orig.tar.gz that
> > > > > is needed to create a binary package on the ftp site. (This can be
> > > > > kept track of by updating a database as packages are added to and
> > > > > deleted from the archive.)
> > > >
> > > > The primary obstacle to this is that the .orig.tar.gz can change from
> > > > one Debian revision to another, without changing name. Schemes for
> > > > dealing with this quickly grow to Byzantine complexities.
> > >
> > > Hmm. Should this be disallowed?
>
> No, certainly not. There are plenty of valid reasons to alter a
> .orig.tar.gz, e.g. switching to or from pristine source, removing,
> adding or modifying binary files, etc.
Still, we could disallow it, and for the rare case in which somebody
needs to alter an .orig.tar.gz, they can either rename it or bump up
the version number. I'd much prefer that over having different
.orig.tar.gz files with the same name.
[Offtopic: I see on Slashdot that Raster (and Red Hat) are at it again
putting out multiple versions of his programs with the same version
number. I ragged on him about that before. I guess he'd rather just
ignore the complaints than change for the better. It's very
frustrating trying to figure out why your stuff won't work when it
turns out you downloaded the wrong copy of XXX.X from the wrong
directory just because you didn't check on irc first. ]
> > > A new debian revision should mean a revision of the DEBIAN part of
> > > the package -- the diff only.
> >
> > Actually, a few weeks ago, I accidentally uploaded an .orig.tar.gz
> > (for gnome-libs) that differed from what was already installed in the
> > ftp archive. Luckily, it got rejected. So I'm not sure that it is
> > possible to have multiple .orig.tar.gz files with the same name.
>
> No, it's very possible, you just have to explicitly enable such
> changes; your upload got rejected because you didn't pass `-sa' to
> dpkg-buildpackage.
Ok.
Cheers,
- Jim
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