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On Sun, Aug 30, 2015 at 10:14:13AM +0200, Vincent Bernat wrote:
> The build script determines the outcome of what will effectively run on
> our users' machine. I fail to see how this is not an important
> issue.
You are correct, this is important.
> But until the effort to get ppc64el, not regenerating the
> configure script was just a fine option and not considered as DFSG
> violation (all bugs were filed with normal severity). And this existed
> for as long as Debian existed!
We changed our minds on this. The previous situation _was_ a problem and so we
no longer think this is acceptable. That's not because autoconf has matured,
but because we changed our priorities.
Your argument seems to be "we did this wrong in the past, so we must do it
wrong now". It surprises me that you think this is a good argument.
> Is that the preferred form of modification? It depends, but from the
> jQuery author point of view, it isn't:
Then it isn't.
> However, this is a readable source code that will accomodate any
> modification that a end user will deem necessary.
That is not the only reason that we want the user to have source. They are not
some detached "customer". When we make changes to upstream code, we want to
give those changes back to upstream(SC#2). I expect that our users (other than
ourselves) often want the same thing. Both for us and for them, it is made
less likely to get changes accepted by upstream if we work on generated files.
> For me, there is no strong problem with DFSG #2 by just using this file as
> the source code.
I wasn't aware that the source was not even provided. So far, I thought the
problem was that the compiler was not available.
So we have:
- - A problem with SC#2, making it harder to give back to the community.
- - A violation of DFSG#2, because the source isn't in the package.
- - A violation of SC#1/Policy 2.2, because the compiler isn't in main[0].
And you say all of this should be ignored, because otherwise some of our users
might be annoyed by our principles? I think you're missing the point then.
Those principles are what sets us apart from other distributions. If users
don't like them, they should use something else. Users that do like our
principles expect us to live up to them. Those are the ones I care about.
You wrote before that you don't want to put something in contrib just because
the compiler isn't in main. But that's exactly what contrib is for. Why do
you insist on not using it? Do you feel your software is less free if it's in
there? Well, our documents agree. But refusing to do it even if it should be
done doesn't solve that problem. Packaging the compiler(s) and running it/them
during package build does.
Thanks,
Bas
[0] As was mentioned in this thread before, policy 2.2.2 says:
The contrib archive area contains supplemental packages [...] which
require software outside of the distribution to [...] build [...].
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