On Tue, Aug 09, 2016 at 06:37:37PM +0100, Ian Jackson wrote: > > But it is actually worse than that. We don't even list copyright for > > what is contained in binary packages. For instance, libjs-sphinxdoc > ^^^^^^ > Did you mean to write "source" ?
Yes, thanks. > > It seems that doing this license tracking properly is beyond our > > capacity. And I actually see more pressing issues, such as actually > > building stuff from source instead of reusing pre-generated configure > > scripts or pre-minified javascript that nobody knows how to regenerate > > (e.g. perl's Configure, but again this really is a common theme). > > Perl's Configure is not a very useful example and has IMO some > justification. I think it's poor engineering to have edited the > output file, but that doesn't mean it's not now the source code. IMO it is a very good example. To determine whether Perl[1]'s Configure is preferred form for modification, I sent a patch. It turned out that my patch couldn't be applied, because it touched generated parts and it was concluded[2] that Configure should be regenerated to fix the reported issue. Demonstrably, Configure is not preferred form for modification. Whether we call it source or not, the freedom to modify is practically lost. Another place where the inability to build from source has hampered progress was blt #772590. Other packages that don't build from source by default include bash, dash, debianutils, dpkg, e2fsprogs, findutils, fribidi, gmp, jemalloc, libatomic-ops, libbsd, libtasn1-6, lzo2, ncurses, nettle, patch, readline6, and sed. I believe that being able to build from source is more important than copying copyright information from packages in Built-Using. > I definitely don't think that popular packages should get a pass. Now we're two, but that's still not project consensus as can be seen in e.g. https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=830978#185. > Are you seriously suggesting that I actually propose a MBF ? If you think that our current practice is wrong, isn't it logical to do so? Helmut [1] Please try not to blame Perl maintainers for the mess. They really took the issue seriously and tried hard to fix it. It really is an upstream issue. [2] https://rt.perl.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=124326#txn-1351869
