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Re: Minified javascripts in packages



Paul Wise <pabs@debian.org> writes:

> On Mon, Apr 13, 2015 at 12:59 PM, Ben Finney wrote:
>
>> Right, I wasn't clear enough: I'm saying that despite all the other
>> non-JavaScript cases brought up later in the thread, the requirement
>> (build from source form, with only build dependencies also in Debian)
>> applies just fine to JavaScript libraries.
>>
>> Can we agree on that?
>
> As I have seen instances where the JavaScript was built by web
> services, I'd say the real world is much too complicated to even agree
> on that.

I presume that we can agree that, if someone started offering a web
service compiling C code with output an order of magnitude better in
every dimension than gcc can achieve, we still wouldn't use it for our
binaries (at least not unless it were available as free software that we
could host ourselves).  What makes JavaScript worthy of special treatment?

Is it not the case that the JavaScript minification that started this
thread is just an optimisation?  Surely the source would work fine
without minification?

The situation with grunt seems (from my quick reading) to be that it is
currently non-free software, at least to the extent that it depends on
JSHint, which by derives from JSLint, from where it inherits the
non-free "no evil" license[1].

There is apparently the prospect of getting rid of the license issue[2]
via the Eclipse Foundation, who seem to have obtained permission to
redistribute without the "evil" clause.

I'm not familiar with grunt, but I also noticed that the jshint bit
seems to be a plugin[3], so I wonder if there is perhaps the possibility
of packaging grunt without the jshint bit and then using that as a
stopgap while awaiting the arrival of the Eclipse fix.

Cheers, Phil.

[1] https://github.com/jshint/jshint/blob/master/src/jshint.js#L19
[2] https://github.com/jugglinmike/jshint/commit/e10eef612282c8fc570f08d932f5654686951e80
[2] https://github.com/gruntjs/grunt-contrib-jshint
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