On 2021-03-05 16:52, Andreas Tille wrote:
On Fri, Mar 05, 2021 at 09:52:47AM +0800, Paul Wise wrote:It seems unlikely that upstream will have changed their mind, it was only a few months ago when we had the discussion with them.I intend to draw it into a different audience[1] but not in the next week where I'm busy with real life issues. Finally the license statement is all about redistribution ... and thanupstream says: Do not redistribute. This sounds not very convincing tome and I would like to ask for technical reasons this opinion might be based upon. But I would prefer to discuss this in the ITP (in CC and Reply-to set) to have a single point of discussion for this issue.
The way I read the upstream developer's comments, it wasn't a technical objection. It was just a social objection: upstream does not want to be bothered with reports of problems arising from different versions (including different linked libraries) other than the versions that they had built themselves. So there's no legal (or technical) reason to not package, just the social reason that doing so will gain the ire of the author.
There is precedence: the author of cdrtools was extremely hostile to packaging,
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2006/08/msg00113.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2006/08/msg00320.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2006/08/msg00653.html Eventually we had to just drop cdrtools (and consequently xcdroast) https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2006/08/msg00775.html Drew