On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 09:47:09AM +0900, Charles Plessy wrote:
> I explained in my GR proposition what led me to conclude that not everything in
> the original archives distributed usptream is a source for Debian. Let's take a
> non-free RFC for example, that is not distributed in a binary package and is
> not touched at build time. Why do you think it is part of the source of the
> Debian operating system?
First of all I don't think there a single clear cut answer to the
question « what is part of Debian? », it is all a matter of where we set
the boundaries. Once they are set, we can easily inspect everything
which is inside and check it against DFSGs.
Nevertheless, I consider our mirrors (more precisely, the "main"
section) to be the most straightforward set of boundaries. Everything
which is there in is something we distribute to our users, it is our
main product and, ultimately, it is Debian.
Of course it is _still_ a matter of semantics, we can state that
something on the mirror is not Debian [1], but it will remain there,
just a "apt-get source" away from our users (and even if they did not
enable other archive parts than "main" in sources.list).
On a more pragmatic side, while with repacking we know that the non-free
bits cannot become part of the final .deb, without repacking we will
loose such a guarantee.
Cheers
PS while your question was perfectly fine, I don't think we should
hijack this thread discussing here the implications of your GR
proposals. If you want to do that, please rather resurrect the
appropriate thread.
[1] in fact, we do that for "contrib" and "non-free", and it is not
surprising that in return some people contend that Debian is
advertising/distributing non-free software via its mirrors
--
Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -<>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
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