Re: Reproducible, precompiled .o files: what say policy+gpl?

[Matthew Dempsky <jivera@flame.org>]

"John H. Robinson, IV" <jaqque@debian.org> writes:

> This package is buildable by tools in main. It meets the letter of the
> law. The spirit seems a bit ambiguous. Good case in point, the m68k
> cross-compiled stuff, where the cross-compiler used was non-free. (I
> have not verified the accuracy of the non-free claim of the cross-
> compiler)

I don't follow that at all.

As I see it, the "spirit" of the DFSG, Social Contract, and
what-have-you are that Debian's main archive must be able to bootstrap
itself and that packages present in it should have been constructed as
such.  An example was given earlier of another package (openoffice.org
I believe) that supported recompilation using a different JDK.

Also, I presume the cross-compiler they were referring to was gcc (I
don't know of any other i386-hosted, m68k-targeted compilers capable
of building the Linux kernel).

gcc isn't non-free.  icc *is*.

Keeping that in mind *is* in the spirit of Debian.

Also, I wouldn't be surprised to know their gcc cross-compiler was
derived from the toolchain-source package which is in main.