Re: Sourceless but useless: how about ignoring some irrelevant files instead of repackaging?
Charles Plessy wrote:
> in one of the packages I mainatain, upstream left some zlib and ncurses static
> libraries for Win32 in the source tarball. Without the copy of the zlib and
> ncurses sources.
<>
> Alternatively, I can of course ask Upstream to remove the Windows binaries, but
> how can I convince him that we hurt our users by leaving these files in the
> Debian source packages, while the sources of zlib and ncurses are actually
> distributed by Debian together with the sources of his program?
You are making the assumption that the source from which those static
libraries were built is equivalent to the source that we ship in Debian.
This is most probably incorrect: think of different versions, patches or
other differences etc. Even if it is now the case, you can't be sure
that it will be in the future, when e.g. the source for one of these
gets updated or removed entirely from Debian.
Not to mention the build-time configuration options -- which, in this
case, is certainly different.
The requirements of main, and often of upstream licenses, is that the
*corresponding* source code must be shipped along the binaries, plus the
build system and its configuration (that's certainly the case for the
GPLv2).
Regards,
Faidon
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