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Re: generated source files, GPL and DFSG



On Tue, Jul 19, 2005 at 04:52:23PM +0200, Bas Wijnen wrote:
> First of all, GFingerPoken is released under the GPL.
> 
> GFingerPoken uses xpms for the graphics.  Those files are included in the
> distribution as .h files, and included directly into the source.  Some of
> them, however, were generated from other files by means of pov-ray.  Those
> files are not in the distribution, but they can be downloaded from the same
> site as a different tarball.
> 
> The previous maintainer packaged only the distribution tarball, and used the
> (generated) .h-files for the compilation of the program.  Technically, that is
> not problematic at all.
> 
> However, when I found that (some of) the graphics had a source from which they
> could be compiled, I concluded two things:
> - To satisfy the GPL, the source for those graphics needs to be distributed as
>   well, so it must be in the source package.
> - I don't know if it's actually written anywhere, but I thought everything
>   that has source and can be compiled should be compiled at package build
>   time.  This means the .h-files have to be regenerated (with pov-ray, in this
>   case).

The DFSG doesn't actually require that we ship source to everything -
just that it be available. That's not an excuse though, since policy
*does* require we ship source to everything.

> Now that's where the problem starts: pov-ray is in non-free, so any package
> with a Build-depends: on it must be in contrib (if it is itself free).  I
> don't like to have non-free software on my machine, so I didn't like that
> idea.  I thought of two solutions for that: create new artwork, or do some
> editing on the existing artwork, which cannot be done automatically.  The
> latter would make it technically impossible to generate the result from
> source, which would probably remove the requirement to do so.  However, that
> just felt too much like going against the gist of the policy, so I chose not
> to do that.

Yes, that wouldn't really benefit anybody.

-- 
  .''`.  ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield
 : :' :  http://www.debian.org/ |
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