On Fri, Oct 17, 2014 at 12:43:29PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote: > Thue Janus Kristensen <thu...@gmail.com> writes:
> > Now in the context of the smarty3 Debian source package, I would like to > > know where in the policy manual it says that the debian/rules build > > target should actually compile from source in favor of shipping > > precompiled object code. However, the Debian policy manual doesn't > > actually seem to say that > > anywhere. https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-source.html would > > seem like the obvious place to say so. > > Am I blind, or is it perfectly OK for a Debian source package to ship and > > install object code, even when the source is available? > This is something for which we don't have something explicit in Policy, > but we do have rules in Debian. Unfortunately, not everything that you > have to do to have a valid Debian package is described in Policy. > In this case, the rule as it's actually enforced is not completely clear > (at least to me), but roughly, it should be *possible* to rebuild the > package from its original source, but it's not required to do this on > every binary package build. However, a lot of folks in Debian feel like > we should be moving towards doing this with every binary build, so I would > expect increasing resistence against not doing so. > But there are many packages in Debian right now that use the results of > bison or flex instead of running bison or flex during the build, and this > has traditionally been accepted. Your PHP example seems to be equivalent, > so I would expect it to be accepted as well, albeit with some resistence > as mentioned above, provided that generating the PHP code from the > original source is still *possible*. > In contrast, using binary *.o files instead of running the compiler has > *not* been accepted. I think this has more to do with practical issues > around the likelihood of creating bugs than any specific principle of > philosophical consistency. In the specific case of smarty, the software appears to be under the LGPL. So it's a violation of the license for Debian to redistribute this without the complete source. -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/ slanga...@ubuntu.com vor...@debian.org
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