Re: Original sources, or not
Glenn McGrath dijo [Thu, Sep 18, 2003 at 06:25:37PM +1000]:
> On Thu, 18 Sep 2003 02:01:25 -0500
> Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> wrote:
>
> > Pristine sources are already a desired, but not required,
> > characteristic. There are enough brain dead upstream packaging
> > practices that we can not mandate pristine sources.
>
> Dont go blaming "upstream" for debians problems, lots of other distro's
> ship pristine sources, thats a poor excuse.
It *is* upstream's fault sometimes. There are many cases of upstream
developers distributing non-free files (i.e., RFCs) which must be
removed in order to distribute an otherwise DFSG-free package in main.
Some upstream authors feel it is nice to provide binaries together with
their sources - sometimes i386 binaries, but this tends to happen more
than anywhere else with Java packages (remember the Write Once Run
Anywhere fiasco/mantra?). Some things are not distributable in a source
package.
> As far as i know, the problem is that our packaging tools cant handle
> the common tar.bz2 format, or having seperate patches.
This is the least of the reasons. As you say, this is being worked on,
but... Usually the case is that upstream's tarball goes against our
policy. As Branden once told me, pristine sources is a nice goal, but
cannot be made a requirement.
Greetings,
--
Gunnar Wolf - gwolf@gwolf.cx - (+52-55)5630-9700 ext. 1366
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