Re: release policy changes
* Andreas Barth:
> One addition I would like very much to see is:
> A library that is included in a package in Debian must be linked to
> dynamically; for static-only executables like sash also static linking
> to that other library package is accepted. Importing and using the
> source code of any library into another package is not permited.
>
> Rationale:
> Some libraries are provided multiple in Debian, IIRC e.g. libz. That is
> bad from general QA (as usually this is just an old version, and normale
> bug fixes don't go in), and especially bad if there is a security update
> necessary.
Sometimes libraries need to be patched. Eliminating clones is always
a very good idea, but there might be obstacles. I'm not sure how to
deal with them.
> Issues that may need to be clarified are IMHO:
>
> Documentation in main and contrib must be freely distributable,
> and wherever possible should be under a DFSG-free license. This
> will likely become a requirement post-sarge.
>
> well, that probably neds to be changed to: "Documentation in main and
> contrib must meet the DFSG", and, so, can be merged with the first
> sentence to "Code and Documentation ...".
I strongly suggest a requirement that documentation is rebuilt from
(plain-text) sources, even if the distributed formats are not too hard
to edit (i.e. HTML). Certainly, this is a must for layout-oriented
formats such as PDF.
> About:
> Shared libraries must be compiled with -fPIC, and normally static
> libraries must not be. If you need to provide static libraries
> compiled with -fPIC, call it "<libname>_pic.a".
>
> There was some discussion last year about a library that was compiled
> w/o PIC on i386 to better utilze the few registers (and that was
> reasonable faster). We might want to switch that for that reason to a
> "-fPIC on !i386, ...". Of course, that probably needs some technical
> discussions.
Wouldn't it be sufficient to defer to generic policy on this one? PIC
library/DSO support is mostly a C/C++-specific domain, and not
everything that Debian ships is written in C/C++ or some scripting
language.
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