Re: Draft GR: Simplification of license and copyright requirements for the Debian packages.
Le Sun, Jan 24, 2010 at 10:56:36PM +0000, MJ Ray a écrit :
> Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org>
>
> > According to our social contract, “We promise that the Debian system and all
> > its components will be free according to [the DFSG].” My understanding of this
> > is that the Debian system, our binary packages, is free and therefore we
> > distribute its sources, the source packages. If these source packages contain
> > non-free files that have no impact on the binary packages, I think that it can
> > be said that they are not part of the Debian system. [...]
>
> Wow, that's a twist. So how do you get around the idea that the
> program must include source?
Hi,
in my opinion, if a file contained in a Debian source package has no function
in the Debian system, if its removal has actually no effect on the system at
all, then it is reasonable to declare that it is not part of the Debian system.
I propose to leave the possibility to maintainers to ignore such files and
leave them in the Debian source packages, even if its source is not available,
since what matters to us is to provide the source of our operating system, not
of files that have no function in it.
For example, in one of my packages (samtools), there is a windows executable
that is built against a free library whose source is not included in the
package. By our current standards it is sourceless and must be removed. I
propose to ignore such files.
In other packages, I found PDFs that look like been made with LaTeX, but their
source is not available. In a couple of cases I managed to get the upstream
maintainers to add the sources, but it often takes monthes. I propose to let
the maintainers exclude these PDFs from the binary packages as long as their
sources are not recovered, but spare the time of implementing the whole tarball
repackaging machinery, especially that if their effort of asking the source
upstram, this machinery is only transiently necessary.
Have a nice day,
--
Charles Plessy
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan
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