Bug#27906: PROPOSED] Binary-only NMU's
> GPL v2, s3, last para, emph mine:
> If distribution of executable or object code is made by offering
> access to copy from a designated place, then offering equivalent
> access to copy the source code _from the same place_ counts as
> distribution of the source code, even though third parties are not
> compelled to copy the source along with the object code.
>
> The BTS is not the same place as the FTP site. For example, many
> people make CDs and mirrors of the FTP site but not of the BTS.
That is right, but the GPL doesn't say here that this is the only
valid method of supplying the source code.
> I don't understand your objection. All I want you to do is not to
> give dpkg-buildpackage the -b flag if you've modified the source, so
> that you upload the source along with your binaries. This is exactly
> what you're doing atm, except that you're not distributing the
> source.
What I (personally) do most of the time is reading the logs that my
build daemon mails to me, and let it do the rest of the boring work :-)
But more seriously: The reasons why this isn't done go all down to
efficiency:
- dpkg-buildpackage first cleans the build tree, then builds the
source, and finally rebuilds the binary packages. If you have a
slow machine like me and waited, for example, 12 hours until the
error happened, you don't want to throw all the results away that
easily...
Ok, I could build the src pkg after the bin pkg by calling
debian/rules clean and dpkg-source --build manually, but that's
again manual work, which is time consuming. And time counts if you
do that not only once, but in masses.
- If a new src version appears in the archive, all other archs have
to recompile this src pkg again (even i386, strictly speaking). If
there are no changes in their binary pkgs, this is a lot of wasted
CPU cycles... And our automatic tools for detecting new source
version (quinn-diff) cannot detect the case of "this won't change
anything for you, you don't need to rebuild it."
- A bin-only upload doesn't affect other archs at all. Consider the
example that we're short before release, and the latest XFree
version doesn't compile on m68k due to a silly typo somewhere (the
example is nearly real :-). We need to recompile with a simple
patch. But if we upload the source, too, then all other archs have
to recompile XFree, too, because otherwise their bin version
wouldn't match the src version. It will take several days until
this is done... Before the hamm release, Brian often rejected new
source versions exactly for this reason, but let bin-only ones in
because they don't generate new work for the others. Otherwise the
release would have been delayed even more.
BTW, if you have that strict position that all binary packages must
match the source package's version, I guess every release will be
delayed much more longer...
Roman
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