Re: Debian violates GPL?

[Steve Dunham <dunham@cse.msu.edu>]

Christian Meder <meder@isr.uni-stuttgart.de> writes:

> On Thu, Dec 17, 1998 at 10:30:31PM -0500, Steve Dunham wrote:

> > While in the process of getting Debian to work on the UltraSparc and
> > update all of the out of date packages, I came across a rather
> > alarming problem: there a quite a few binary packages in binary-sparc
> > (and binary-*) that don't have source.  One example is
> > "glibc-pre2.1-2.0.100.orig.tar.gz", which disappeared from potato when
> > "glibc-pre2.1-2.0.105.orig.tar.gz" was uploaded (slink has an older
> > version).

> We wouldn't have this problem if sparc would be frozen by
> now. Unfortunately that's not the case. Ftpmasters, do you know when
> you will find the time to freeze sparc ? (I certainly don't want to
> push you -- you are overworked anyway -- but we __really__ need the
> freeze)

I depends on when they freeze it, the 2.0.100 source has been missing
for a while (it disappeared when powerpc or some other distribution
uploaded 2.0.105).  None of the slink distributions currently use
glibc-pre2.1, so the 2.0.95 source in slink can be replaced when the
freeze happens.

After it is frozen, they have to manually process each package that is
added (I assume you will be adding quite a few packages after the i386
stuff slows down).  When I last counted 300 packages were out of date
and 600 were missing.

> > The sparc distribution has 300 packages that are older versions than
> > the ones in slink which means that the source and/or diff files are
> > missing.  This would violate the GPL.

> I wanted to wait till the i386 recompilation rush settles down a bit
> so we don't have to recompile stuff twice.

Good idea.  How do you want to handle libjpeg?  Currently we have
libjpeg6a, if libjpeg62-dev is installed, then any program that is
subsequently linked against libtiff will be broken.  If libtiff is
also updated, then everything linked against the old libtiff will be
broken.

One option is to keep the same libjpeg.  This will put off the problem
until later - after the freeze. (We will eventually want to switch to
libjpeg6b, and this will probably happen before the soname of libtiff
changes.)

The other option is to update libjpeg and libtiff and then recompile
everything that depends on them.


I've uploaded wmaker (which was very out of date), xpdf (which was
missing), and amaya (which was missing) to incoming.  (In addition to
the packages that I mentioned yesterday.)


Steve
dunham@cse.msu.edu