Re: ITP enhydra

[Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer@pasteur.fr>]

On Monday 4 September 2000, at 2 h 22, the keyboard of Matt Zimmerman 
<mdz@csh.rit.edu> wrote:

> it acceptable to use the upstream binary tarball as the .orig for a Debian
> source package, as it is architecture-independent?  Or must it compile from the
> Java source?

If the package is in 'non-free', you don't even need the sources. IMHO (but 
IANAL), for a package to get in 'main', you HAVE TO be able to compile it from 
the sources.

For programs written in C, it goes without saying, but it seems some Debian 
packagers forget this, because upstream Java packages usually come with the 
binary, a binary which is often very difficult to regenerate (which reminds me 
the time of Ultrix, where Digital accepted to ship the sources, but they were 
almost impossible to compile, if you wanted to reboot your Vax with a patched 
version).