Re: definition of contrib & buildd inconsistency
On Sun, 21 Mar 2010, Steve Langasek wrote:
On Sun, Mar 21, 2010 at 04:37:25PM -0500, Carlo Segre wrote:
* free packages which require contrib, non-free packages or packages
which are not in our archive at all for compilation or execution,
There is apparently an ambiguity here since a contrib package can
depend on non-free in two distinct ways:
No, there isn't. "for compilation or execution" - so if it depends on
packages not in main at build time *or* at run time.
You are correct, I missed that.
It's possible that most maintainers when confronted with this have simply
opted to move their packages directly to non-free in order to get
autobuilder support. There are only five packages in contrib currently
affected by this problem (out of 74 total that build architecture-dependent
packages): ifeffit and libpgplot-perl, which b-d on pgplot5;
r-cran-surveillance, which b-d on r-cran-maptools; snes9express, which b-d
on snes9x-x; and suitesparse-metis, which b-d on libparmetis-dev.
Yes, two of these are my packages and when I initially uploaded them, I
followed the letter of the Policy which makes them contrib not non-free.
I have no choice now but to move them both to non-free, however, my
attempt to do this has been rejected by ftpmaster. I am not sure how to
proceed at this point.
An alternative which would remove the inconsistency is to make the
decision that contrib packages will not be built by the officeial
buildd network but have to be built as non-free packages are, on the
unofficial buildd network.
If my understanding is current, non-free packages are autobuilt only as a
result of explicit whitelisting indicating that there are no license
problems resulting from doing so. I think the same would have to be true of
contrib packages, since even *installing* packages from non-free could have
license implications that impact the buildd operators.
OK, in my case pgplot5 has been whitelisted for many years. Is it
possible to have these contrib packages whitelisted on the non-free buildd
network too?
--
Carlo U. Segre -- Professor of Physics
Associate Dean for Graduate Admissions, Graduate College
Illinois Institute of Technology
Voice: 312.567.3498 Fax: 312.567.3494
segre@iit.edu http://www.iit.edu/~segre segre@debian.org
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