Dear Debian mentors I am the co-maintainer for packages mindi and mondo which had bugs #233606 and #233605 filed a while ago. These bugs where about the packages containing binaries in the upstream source. This was true, the binaries have been removed since and the bugs closed.
However, this means that we are currently not distributing the pristine upstream sources of mindi and mondo, which I am not overly happy with. (I am highlighting this fact by adding sub-versions to the upstream versions in the package names.) As I am about to package new upstream versions, I would like to seek clarification on this: The above bugs state 'Policy 2.2.1' as justification which is pretty much catch all. I suppose the relevant point is DFSG compliance. While the DFSG clearly states that all software has to come with code, I fail to see how this would in general forbid to have binaries in the upstream source file. The situation is such that binaries in the upstream source package are either irrelevant for the Debian package and such are not present in the corresponding deb or they are being replaced with a separate deb that then of course has its corresponding source package, i.e. comes with full source. Please note further that all binaries in the upstream source packages of mindi and mondo come with licences that allow redistribution, so there is definitely no legal issue. It all boils down to what the DFSG means in terms of binaries in upstream sources - the mondo and mindi debs only contain binaries that come with source code via the normal Debian package mechanism. I would very much welcome your help on this. Should the answer be that the binaries indeed have to be removed from the upstream source in the orig.tar.gz file, I would also very much like to know whether my current approach of appending a sub-version to the upstream version number is approriate (example: 2.03 -> 2.03.1). Finally, if you feel that this should rather be brought up in a different forum, please accept my apologies and kindly point me to a better place. Thank you very much & best regards Andree -- Andree Leidenfrost Sydney - Australia
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