Re: Minified files and source code requirement

[Faidon Liambotis <paravoid@debian.org>]

On 10/27/11 20:53, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Compressing all the whitespace out of it seems fine to me; you can fix
> that well enough using an indenter.  If the variables are also rewritten
> into meaningless names, I think it becomes more borderline.  If the code
> is part "compiled" by, for instance, precomputing significant results or
> doing things like turning a yacc parser into the table-driven C code, I
> don't think it counts as source any more.

Google's way of "minifiying" javascript, Closure, is actually a
JavaScript to JavaScript compiler: it removes dead code, inlines and
reorders functions and variables, etc.

And of course, there's no easy way of knowing how much content a
minifier has stripped (i.e. if it's a complicated process like Closure,
a simple variable replacement or something in between), which is all the
more of an argument against accepting them without their respective
source.

Regards,
Faidon