Re: Debian violates GPL?
I've used Manoj's scripts. They do not keep things in pristine condition.
No fault of Manoj's or of his scripts, but simply a result of the process.
I for one do not like the idea of distributing tarfiles that are any more
different from the original than necessary.
On Sat, Dec 19, 1998 at 05:54:38PM -0600, Rob Browning wrote:
> upstream releases and between debian releases on a file by file basis
> (no tarfiles).
Making it take forever to download, almost impossible to mirror, excessive
for mirror space, etc. The CVS scripts are fine for their intended purpose,
but would be a disaster for this.
> in). Manoj's scripts automate *all* of this, including checking out
> the right branch and making the orig.tar.gz when you need to do an
> upload.
However, this generated orig.tar.gz is not necessarily the same as a real
tar.gz from upstream. Furthermore, I have had my share of problems with the
packages. Elm, for instance, refuses to build when under cvs-buildpackage
control (but other packages work). There are problems with the update
process, where the developer is not always notified of rejected patches or
patches are not applied, or things are uploaded without diff.gz, etc. So
I've gone back to the traditional way, which works fine.
> I was under the impression that we just have to make the source
> available on demand charging no more than reasonable
> shipping/handling. If that's so, then this is no problem. Now we'd
> still have the current source/diff/orig files on the mirrors, so this
> would only be an issue for people who want something old.
See also my reply to others.
Note that "something old" is not accurate. Something "older" is more
accurate. "Old" could be a day older, before Mozilla integrated changes
that broke it on 64-bit platforms, for instance. Why do you insist on
making life so hard for those that need to use older versions of certain
software for whatever reason?
<RANT>
I say to you, and to all others that want to make life difficult for those
of us not limited by the x86 architecture: Write your applications
correctly, with good code, in the first place, and the problem will
disappear! Unfortunately, this being real life, there are clueless,
misinformed, or careless people out there -- or even just simple bugs that
appear because some developers only test on x86 and not on big-endian or
64-bit machines.
We already have to put up with this sort of broken code. Now you're making
life more difficult for us. I don't like it one bit, not one, and I am
offended by this continual treatment of non-x86 CPUs as second-class
citizens in Debian. In my case, I believe my 64-bit Alpha 600MHz machine to
be far better than anything Intel produces, so it's not as if I'm running an
inferior CPU or anything.
Also be aware that those of us on Alpha or UltraSparc are catching all these
64-bit problems now, so when ia64 comes out and the great masses stick with
Intel, our code will already have been cleaned by the Alpha and UltraSparc
people, with little help from others.
</RANT>
--
John Goerzen Linux, Unix consulting & programming jgoerzen@complete.org |
Developer, Debian GNU/Linux (Free powerful OS upgrade) www.debian.org |
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