On måndagen den 7 september 2009, Andreas Tille wrote: > On Mon, Sep 07, 2009 at 09:01:04PM +0900, Charles Plessy wrote: > > in one of the packages I mainatain, upstream left some zlib and ncurses > > static libraries for Win32 in the source tarball. > > IMHO it is always a good idea to remove crap from an upstream tarball. > Static libraries are definitely crap and are just wasting our archive. > So in this case rebuilding the tarball sounds a prefectly reasonable > action if done properly in a get-orig-source target and documented in > README.source. I have a different example: Upstream bundles a couple of libraries (unmodified source tarballs + modified versions of some files), which happen to contain some tiny non-free bits (like RFCs and GFDL-licensed documentation with cover texts). In this case, too, those bundles are not used at all in building binary packages, as separate Debian packages exist, but in contrast to Charles's example there are no sourceless binaries, so there should be no license infractions. IMHO it's almost ridiculous that 1) a single file buried within a tarball in the upstream tarball can taint the entire source package, and 2) the full copyright information and license of the superfluous bundled library has to be included in debian/copyright. To some extent, repacking the upstream tarball defeats the purpose of having an "orig" tarball plus a Debian diff, and Debian should be valued by the amount and quality of free software we manage to include rather than by the amount of non-free software we manage to *exclude*, right? Granted, if all or a part of a piece of software is released without permission to modify, for example, then clearly that software doesn't belong in main, but removing every single non-free (but redistributable) file, even those that are really quite unrelated to the software they happen to come with, is more harmful than helpful. -- Magnus Holmgren holmgren@debian.org Debian Developer
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