Re: Current NEW review process saps developer motivation

[Sam Hartman <hartmans@suchdamage.org>]

>>>>> "Simon" == Simon McVittie <smcv@debian.org> writes:

    Simon> I don't think building from the least-derived form is always
    Simon> the right thing to do. For instance, take rust-glib-sys, a
    Simon> package of Rust bindings for the GLib library, which is one
    Simon> of the libraries whose handling prompted this thread. It
    Simon> contains a description of the GLib library's API/ABI,
    Simon> basically the Rust equivalent of a C header file. It could
    Simon> have been written by hand, but that would be tedious and
    Simon> error-prone, so instead its upstream maintainers chose to
    Simon> machine-generate the API/ABI description from GLib. The thing
    Simon> that would be closest to "true source" would presumably be to
    Simon> redo that machine-generation process, from first principles,
    Simon> at build-time.

As a general rule, I think that we should require that Debian contain
the software necessary to build from the least derived form, even if for
good reasons that you outline, we do not always do that.
It's possible that there are cases where this rule should be violated.
But in most of the cases I've thought about (including this one), user
freedom is likely to be impacted if Debian
does not contain the necessary software to rebuild the generated
components.


In this case, it would be reasonable for a user to want to extend glib
and to rebuild the rust bindings with those extensions.
Such a rebuild would introduce incompatibility,
but that's okay in a local context if someone wants to do that.
Actually, it's more than okay; it's an important freedom.

--Sam