I'm leaning towards regenerating all mechanically generated files (including autotools stuff). I think it helps us live up to our promises (SC items 1-4, DFSG item 2).
As an example of what I mean; the game naev was proposed to be added to Debian. Looking at the images I noted that some of them looked like renderings of 3D models. It turns out upstream was storing pre-rendered images in their git repository and the models etc in another git repository. Even worse is that they haven't been generated recently and now they cannot be generated any more because the blender API has changed incompatibly. I've read somewhere that some Debian users appreciate our dedication to fixing FTBFS bugs since they reduce headaches when trying to modify and rebuild our packages. If we don't rebuild from source we aren't ensuring that our users have such essential freedoms as being able to modify our source packages and have their modifications be represented in the resulting binary packages. It is important to ask questions when looking at the material distributed by upstream, especially when it is not the usual stuff free software developers are used to dealing with (programming languages and executables). Finding out what the source code is can be a hard problem, even for programs (cf #383465), some tips for finding cases of non-program material with missing source code or non-free bits: Docs: PDFs can embed fonts, which might be non-free. Check the metadata, it might indicate how it was produced and that there is something (TeX or Microsoft Word docs) missing. Images: 3D model renderings might indicate some blender or other models are missing. text in the image can indicate a font is missing or a non-free font might have been used. metadata indicating they were created in Inkscape or GIMP can mean that an SVG or XCF file is missing. Similarly for any files mentioning Adobe products. Audio: Ogg/Mp3 means the original audio isn't present or was thrown away. metadata in these files might indicate that some non-free audio programs or non-free audio samples were used to generate the audio. -- bye, pabs http://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/BANLkTindWv-rwWE01iEx=1kjbupq83e...@mail.gmail.com
