Re: bladeenc

[Brian Ristuccia <brianr@osiris.978.org>]

On Wed, Jun 30, 1999 at 01:54:05PM -0700, Joseph Carter wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 30, 1999 at 03:26:07PM -0400, Brian Ristuccia wrote:
> > >
> > > The Netherlands, which should be safe. I'm not sure how having an
> > > mp3-encode on non-US will influence our mirrors though.
> > 
> > As soon as I figure out how to use dupload, it should be there. 
> 
> That's fine except that you were not the one who ITP'd it first.
> 

I can't find any intent to package bladeenc messages in the past 3 months of
the debian-devel archives. If someone else is working on packaging bladeenc,
I'd be glad to share my Makefile, manual page, and patches with them. 

> Second you live in a country in which a lawsuit is possible (and likely)
> for distributing mp3 encoders without paying royalties.
> 

Is it possible to get debianqueued to fetch the original tar file from the
original FTP site? Also, can I use a non-context diff for the .patch file?
Are there any servers running debianqueued that are also running build
daemons?

> Third, you managed to upload it to the OTHER country which for certain
> would allow their lawyers to sue rather than pandora, the only server you
> could safely and legally upload it to.
> 
> Fourth, there is an active discussion as to whether or not we can
> distribute packages of this thing in even our non-US archive on pandora
> without risking Bad Things for us and our mirrors on the legal front.
> 

We should really have a Debian package header like
Prohibited-By-Thought-Police-In: with a list of ISO country codes to prevent
mirrors in non-free countries from picking up these packages if we know the
software is prohibited there. Otherwise, I think the only other solution
would be for mirror operators to take reposibility for omiting files they
are not able to distribute (yuck). 

> Fifth, well there is no fifth, but I wanted five anyway..  =>
> 
> 
> In short you boo-boo'd.  Fortunately while your boo-boo is a potentially
> big one, the packages will probably be removed before their lawyers send
> us a "friendly" letter telling us to start paying them or they'll see us
> in court...  That is if you don't fix it yourself by deleting those files
> from incoming.  Sorry if I seemed harsh above---I want mp3 encoders in
> Debian as much as anyone.  It's just no good to anyone if we don't do it
> very carefully and cover our arses.

The first bladeenc I uploaded was incorrect -- it was missing the copyright
and a few other things. It was also signed with gnupg instead of PGP. It's
already propogated its way to master. When I tried to upload another via
erlangen, it complained that it was already on master. I logged into master
and deleted those files from Incoming just in case they should happen to get
accepted anyway. 

It's my understanding that master is in the US. What does one have to do in
order to prevent non-US packages from ending up on master, or is this the
case automagically if I upload to the correct server?

-- 
Brian Ristuccia
brianr@osiris.978.org
bristucc@nortelnetworks.com
bristucc@cs.uml.edu