Re: Minified javascript files
Vincent Bernat <bernat@debian.org> writes:
> ❦ 19 août 2012 15:11 CEST, "Bernhard R. Link" <brlink@debian.org> :
>> They are distributing files without source, so everyone else can either
>> not just easily modify it or verify if it really does what it is
>> supposed to do. This is definitely a shortcoming in what upstream ships
>> and really something you should bug upstream about.
> The source is one link away. People wanting the source just have to
> click on the link in the header of the minified version. As for
> verification, having the source next to the minified version does not
> guarantee anything about the minified version, all the more that we
> don't have currently in Debian Wheezy a reliable minifier.
Right.
Debian's current policies here aren't exactly wrong. In an ideal world,
we would indeed always provide source next to everything, and that's a
good goal. But this is a very hard sell upstream, whose immediate
reaction is "There are copies of the unminified source of jquery all over
the net -- you can't throw a rock without hitting one! Why am I
responsible for shipping the 48,194th copy?" There really isn't any
feasible scenario in which someone wanting to modify the package can't
find the relevant source (*provided* that they haven't modified jquery or
the similar Javascript library first before minimizing it, but that's
quite rare).
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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