libcgi-pm-perl repacking (.gif files)

[Niko Tyni <ntyni@debian.org>]

Hi Alessandro and the debian-perl list,

I just noticed that libcgi-pm-perl has aqcuired a +dfsg version suffix:

libcgi-pm-perl (3.58+dfsg-1) unstable; urgency=low
[...]
  * Remove *.gif images from upstream tarball 
    (not in preferred form of modification)
[...]
 -- Alessandro Ghedini <al3xbio@gmail.com>  Sun, 13 Nov 2011 14:19:28 +0100

The removed .gif images can be found at for example
 http://cpansearch.perl.org/src/MARKSTOS/CGI.pm-3.59/examples/dna.small.gif
 http://cpansearch.perl.org/src/MARKSTOS/CGI.pm-3.59/examples/wilogo.gif

The reasoning behind the repacking is not clear to me, and I couldn't
easily find any discussion about it. Is there any proof that those files
are distributed without their source (as in "not in the preferred form
of modification")? Has this been discussed upstream?

It does seem possible to me that a .gif file could be the real source,
for example if the image was created with Gimp and then only saved out
as in gif format, or if the original .xcf has been lost and the .gif
is the only thing left.

I'm bringing this up mainly because it has repercussions for the perl package:
- we embed the CGI.pm distribution including the above files so we should
  presumably repack them too if necessary
- we declare that perl-modules Breaks older versions of CGI.pm, and the +dfsg
  suffix may need to be taken into account in that declaration 

I'm not really fond of the idea of tacking a +dfsg suffix to perl too
because of this, unless we really have to. And if we don't, it would be
much cleaner to undo it in libcgi-pm-perl too.
-- 
Niko Tyni   ntyni@debian.org