Re: more evil firmwares found
On Sun, Apr 25, 2004 at 11:05:22PM -0500, Ryan Underwood wrote:
> In that case, maybe we should just come out and say that there is really
> nothing binding Debian developers to policy, and that they are free to
> make arbitrary decisions without accountability. If the policy is just
> a set of goals rather than a set of rules under which Debian development
> is conducted, perhaps that should be laid out more explicitly.
Are you aware that the "G" in "DFSG" stands for "Guidelines"?
> The source code is the editable form of a computer program in the syntax
> of the language it was developed in.
You amended "code", and provided a narrow definition that only applies to
programs.
If I write a function in C, compile the result to assembly, and then do
all further work on the function based on the assembly output, then the
source for me is assembly. This isn't completely contrived; if I'm doing
a lot of hand-tuning in assembly, I may never touch the original C code
again.
> Do you have a better one?
"The preferred form for modification". It's generalized to all software,
including non-programs. It "scales" well to nontrivial situations such as
the above.
Do you have an actual objection to that definition, or are you only trying
to replace it because you don't want "source" to apply to non-programs? :)
(FWIW, at the moment I'm not arguing that we should be applying source
requirements to everything in Debian; it's appealing, but I'm not entirely
convinced.)
--
Glenn Maynard
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