The Wanderer (12020-06-09): > (Please stop CCing me on replies - especially to messages which I did > not actually send - unless you're specifically trying to draw my > attention to a particular message and think I may not notice it without > the CC. Not only am I subscribed, I am in fact reading this thread on a > multiple-times-a-day basis, as my multiple replies to it to date may > have indicated.) Instead of writing this periodically, you could include: Reply-To: debian-user@lists.debian.org in your headers just like I did. Properly configured mailing-list software does it by default for subscribed users, but Debian is an exception. It fixes the issue of annoying ccs once and for all. > FWIW, I have tried, at least in part. > > For the individual broken-out projects (which may or may not be rolled > up into the larger "master" project, I can't easily tell), I succeeded > with one, and failed with another, but suspect that I could succeed with > the latter with more effort. > > For the apparent "master" project, I admit that I didn't bother to try, > because of the exact "too many prebuilt apparent-dependency objects with > no apparent way provided to rebuild them" issue; unless we can rebuild > those objects, not only can we not be sure we have the source for them, > we can't be sure that building with a different version of that object > will even work. > > Even a successful build from a repository like that would not > demonstrate that you can actually completely rebuild the project from > scratch; you'd have to actually track down the source for all of those > individual prebuilt objects, rebuild each one, and pull the result in to > the build in a way which will get picked up, and that's more effort than > I'm willing to put in for the sake of a mailing-list discussion like > this one. Thank you for these clarifications. > I don't fault the developers too much for providing a version of the > project tree with prebuilt dependencies like that; it's a useful > convenience for those who just want to get it to work and for whom > farting around with trying to find the right dependencies and get them > into place would be too much of a hassle. But for (as far as I can tell) > providing the tree in *only* that form, and not providing (as far as > I've found) *any* documentation on what these prebuilt objects are and > why they're needed and how to get them separately and build them and so > forth, there I do fault them, and consider that a ding against proper > Free status. I state it that way: the knowledge of how to obtain and build these objects is part of the source code of the project, just as much as a makefile or configure script. Unfortunately, that bit of source code only resides in the head of the developers, it is not distributed. Consider a minified javascript program with a GPL license header slapped on top of it: should we consider it Libre Software? Of course not. The same happens here: out of negligence probably, the authors keep part of the source code for themselves. It is not Libre Software. Regards, -- Nicolas George
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