On Sep 28, Ian Jackson <ian@davenant.greenend.org.uk> wrote: > > 1) Ship a built copy of the code in the package's .diff.gz, and DTRT > > at package creation time to move the .bin from debian/ to the right > > place in the staging tree. The source code for the .bin is in > > .orig.tar.gz, under a free license. Anyone is free to modify or [...] > This is (unfortunately for you) not acceptable for Debian proper. > Everything in Debian must be buildable from source using tools in > Debian. No, you are wrong. This is the right way, and I can think about at least one precedent (yaboot). It must be possible to fully compile from source the packages in main by only using other packages in main, but there is no requirement that this is done every time the binary debian package is built[1]. Another example is documentation which is distributed in the source package in both "source" and "compiled" form and is not rebuilt because while it would be possible this would add more build dependencies, waste buildds time and would not be needed anyway. In this case the firmware image distributed as a blob in the source package can be built using the gcc-4.3-source package to create a crosscompiler (there is no requirement to have a single-step procedure). [1] In practice the release managers and/or the debian security team nowadays require this to easily allow fixing security bugs in released packages, but I expect that they will have no objections to this specific case. -- ciao, Marco
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