Re: Proposed amendment (compiling non-free packages from source in main)
James Troup wrote:
> Nobody has this requirement? Everyone *but* i386 has the need to
> auto-build (and i386 may in the future). So please try and stop
> seeing the world centered around i386. This is not just a matter of
> me being unwilling to install anything more than the absolutely
> necessary amount of non-free software, this is a genuine problem
> because some non-free software is source-less and as such is
> uninstallable on anything but i386. It's very easy for you to say
> "Oh, don't be so silly just install X to compile it", but when X has
> no source, it's kind of hard to install X on my non-i386 machine.
>
> Take postgresql: it has a JDK based part, this made the package
> uncompilable on m68k without ``tweaking'' because JDK does not and
> will not exist for Linux/m68k. While postgresql was unsplit[1] no one
> bothered to compile it on m68k because no one had the time to fix it.
> It may sound trivial to you to ``alter the debian/rules'' a bit, but
> when you have to compile every single upload that is made, you might
> see it a little differently. Remember the non-i386 people are
> volunteers too and so short in number asking them to fix broken
> packages because their i386 maintainers can't be bothered to is not a
> winning attitude.
In the imlib case we are talking about gif support rather than anything else.
The reason why imlib has the setup we have now is to avoid makeing the whole
of GNOME and Enlightenment non-free. I think this is enough to warrant an
execption to policy. The problem in this case is not lack of sources but
possible patent problems and since there are both free and non-free targets
in the package, I am not sure how important this is.
In any case, having an automatically created rules file is probably the most
powerful aproach anyway. I'd definitively go for that if workable.
Luis.
--
Luis Francisco Gonzalez <luisgh@cogs.susx.ac.uk>
PGP Fingerprint = F8 B1 13 DE 22 22 94 A1 14 BE 95 8E 49 39 78 76
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