Re: RFS: automake-idl

["Bernhard R. Link" <brlink@debian.org>]

* Olaf Mandel <olaf@mandel.name> [080601 10:38]:
> I am looking for a sponsor for my packages "autoconf-orb" and
> "automake-idl".
> 
> * Package name    : autoconf-orb
>   Version         : 1.1.1-1
>   Upstream Author : Vladimir Panov  <gbr@voidland.org>
> * URL             : http://sourceforge.net/projects/autotools-idl/
> * License         : GPLv3
>   Section         : devel
> 
> * Package name    : automake-idl
>   Version         : 1.1.0.1.10.1-1
>   Upstream Author : Vladimir Panov  <gbr@voidland.org>
> * URL             : http://sourceforge.net/projects/autotools-idl/
> * License         : GPLv3
>   Section         : devel

Some things from a first shallow look:

* None of those packages contains config.guess/config.sub nor uses them.
  So there is no need to copy them in before configure.
* the repeated use of $(CURDIR) where a . or nothing at all would
  have sufficed is a bit annoying. (especially when done unsafe and
  unecessarily adding new problems if paths contain spaces).
* having a build-indep and a build-arch (the latter doing nothing)
  would be nice.
* most things starting with # from the templates can be removed when
  not needed. That makes the whole thing much more readable.
* The "For details, see ..." in the package description looks like a
  candidate for a Homepage field instead.
* Copyright information is incomplete. While copyright information
  of the build files if often forgotten (but better should not be),
  at least automake-idl seems to contain at least a partial fork
  auf automake (as opposed to be generated or copied by automake).
  Even if you do not install that stuff, it's copyrights and licenses
  should be listed.

And let me say that GPLv3+ is a very strange license for those files,
as it makes them explicitly impossible to be used by GPLv2 programs.
It might be adviseable to put the license information into the distributed
.m4 files, so if they end up in a GPLv2 project, they can more easily
be spotted.

The missing copyright information in most of the files also makes me
quite suspicious. It is not unusal for such collections to just contain
things from other sources and missing attribution (and thus a license
to distribute them). Some more checks into that might be appropriate.

Hochachtungsvoll,
	Bernhard R. Link