Raul Miller wrote:
But "distribution" and "bits on the wire" aren't equivalent.
What we distributed to the users is clearly source code. They can cd into the directory and read it if they please.
If someone were to write special tools that would download the source in an encrypted form and prevent the user from ever seeing the source using some hypothetical DRM and use that to build binaries, then the distribution != bits on wire argument might be right.
As a general rule, those commands don't go figuring out where to get the sources and download them for you. Nor are they specially documented in the distributor's notes on the package.
I assure you ./configure and make are quite documented in any sane package that uses them. I bet even ./configure --with-ssl is.