Charles Plessy wrote: > in one of the packages I mainatain, upstream left some zlib and ncurses static > libraries for Win32 in the source tarball. Without the copy of the zlib and > ncurses sources. <> > Alternatively, I can of course ask Upstream to remove the Windows binaries, > but > how can I convince him that we hurt our users by leaving these files in the > Debian source packages, while the sources of zlib and ncurses are actually > distributed by Debian together with the sources of his program? You are making the assumption that the source from which those static libraries were built is equivalent to the source that we ship in Debian.
This is most probably incorrect: think of different versions, patches or other differences etc. Even if it is now the case, you can't be sure that it will be in the future, when e.g. the source for one of these gets updated or removed entirely from Debian. Not to mention the build-time configuration options -- which, in this case, is certainly different. The requirements of main, and often of upstream licenses, is that the *corresponding* source code must be shipped along the binaries, plus the build system and its configuration (that's certainly the case for the GPLv2). Regards, Faidon -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected]
