Bug#890601: firmware-free: Source Package Doesn't Contain Source
Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> wrote ..
> Can you be more specific? Which file have you found in the source
> package that does not have corresponding source included?
OK; perhaps this bug needs re-titling. There seems to be "a" source
present, but the programs don't appear to be built from it.
What started this is that I tried to build the usbdux firmware from
source and found that the assembler needed to build the firmware
segfaulted when trying to do so. Curious as to how Debian got the
firmware to build I checked out the firmware-free package. The answer
seems to be: They didn't; they just use the binaries from linux-
firmware.git. (The sha512 hashes appear to be identical.)
If they were built from source then the build dependencies for firmware-
free would be bigger (such as, among others, depending on as31 in order
to build the usbdux firmware) and the breakage of tools needed to build
the firmware would have been noticed.
Surely including auto-generated files and/or just re-cycling upstream's
binaries in a source package either is or should be some sort of policy
violation? Building from source would help to ensure that the provided
source is complete, corresponding, and buildable. It would also be
consistent with the proposed stuff for JavaScript to exclude auto-
generated files from source.
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